Best Video Ever of the Day: Hand-Made Machine Plays a Song Using 2,000 Marbles — Wintergatan

My favorite album of 2013 was not a metal album at all. Wintergatan’s self-titled dazzled and amazed in both its intricacy and immediacy, and to this day I still get emails from readers thanking me for introducing the band to them, even though they’ve got nothing to do with metal.

Band mastermind Martín Molin, whose hand-made instruments are paramount to Wintergatan’s sound, has been building a machine that makes music with marbles for over a year while documenting the process for fans in a series of videos on the band’s Facebook page. The machine, which utilizes 2,000 marbles in a Rube Goldberg-like fashion and was built with over 3,000 parts, is finally finished, and he’s released a music video of the beautiful monstrosity in action, playing a new song in full.

And…. holy shit! This is incredible. I don’t know how else to describe it. Every detail! Perfectly thought out. Thousands of hours of planning and hard work.

When I first loaded this video yesterday it had 35k views, and now it’s up over 3 million. So stoked to see this band finally getting some widespread recognition! The video was filmed and edited by Hannes Knutsson. Watch the “making of” video below, too.

No word on a new album, but band management tells us the plan for now is to just release songs one at a time at Martín finishes them. Fine with me.