Anyone unfamiliar with the Eurovision Song Contest could be forgiven for assuming that the annual roster of contestants is populated entirely by generic Europop artists. Real heads, however, know that the best part of the contest is the genuine weirdos: the Russian babushkas, the Finnish Gwar enthusiasts, the Estonian… whatever this is.
With that in mind, we were delighted to see that the UK will be represented at this year’s competition by Sam Bartle, who goes by the stage name “LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER.” You may be familiar with Bartle from his YouTube channel, where he spends a lot of time tooling around with esoteric modular synthesisers, and a lot more time designing and building his own weird and wonderful creations—both musical and otherwise. Some highlights from the latter category: the hellish machine built with an orchestra of Furbies, the 1000-oscillator “megadrone” (“It’s like a football stadium full of oscillators… on the wall!”), and the time he bought an entire church organ and installed it in his basement.
So, OK, if you’re looking for a new favorite YouTube creator, Bartle definitely checks pretty much every conceivable box. But performative eccentrics are dime a dozen on YouTube. Revisiting his channel in the wake of the Eurovision news, we got to thinking about why we enjoy Bartle’s work so much.
There are two main reasons. The first is that Bartle’s personality doesn’t come across as at all contrived; you get the sense that this is genuinely who he is. The second is that his desire to experiment stems ultimately from an insatiable curiosity about the possibilities of sound, rather than a desire to make wacky content for the sake of it. It also helps that Bartle is a legitimately good musician; his former band played Glastonbury a decade ago, and if you look carefully through his channel, you’ll find some excellent original songs smattered amongst all the circuit-bending madness. His restless energy has also extended to running a museum and releasing a video game.
Having said all that, we have absolutely no idea what he’ll do at Eurovision. As per the BBC, the Eurovision song will premiere “in the coming weeks”—so will he break out the flamethrower organ? Or the sausage organ? Or the actual church organ?? Or will he suddenly go all Europop on us? There’s only one way to find out, but whatever happens, only good things can come of unleashing a man who once rigged up the accelerator of his Mini Minor to be controlled by a Theremin on the world’s biggest pop music competition.
