Cousins of invention

You might never have heard of Brian and Leon Dewan or their oddball musical creations, such as the melody gin or the folk synthesizer. But, chances are, you have heard the swarmatron play.

Its haunting, discordant sound lurked within the shadows of this year’s “Little Red Riding Hood” movie and punctuated large parts of Trent Reznor’s soundtrack to last year’s “The Social Network.”

Since Reznor bought a swarmatron in 2010, and since he won last year’s Oscar for Best Original Score, the Dewan cousins have scrambled to meet demand, following what Brian recently described as “the surge.”

“I’ve been busting my a** doing woodwork all the time,” said Brian, 48, who builds the wooden shells for Dewanatron instruments at his home in Catskill, N.Y., and then lugs them to his cousin Leon, in nearby New Rochelle, to be filled with homemade electric circuitry.

The Dewans have sold almost 30 handmade instruments over the past 18 months, “mostly to people in Hollywood, if not in the movie business then in show business,” Brian said.

Now, they are preparing for the release of their newest creation: the hymnotron.

Almost 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide, the only hymnotron in the world currently stands in the corner of a front room in Leon’s sparsely furnished home like an oversized upright piano.

The hymnotron weighs 80 or 90 pounds and is so awkward to carry that since the Dewans built it in 2007, they have hauled it out of the house for just two public performances.

They swear that the first production model, which will be shipped this fall to the specialist music store, Big City Music in Los Angeles, will be smaller and lighter.

But the growing number of Dewanatron fans may have to wait a bit longer before they can buy it.

Roger Cordell, Big City Music’s owner, vowed that he will save the first model for himself, noting that he made a mistake selling the swarmatron and other Dewanatron instruments to Hollywood composers and collectors without keeping one.

“These guys are brilliant,” Cordell said. “People are going to look back and say that what they are doing now is like Bob Moog coming up with the theremin in the ’50s and the Moog synthesizer in the ’60s.”

In the history of electronic music, the Dewans may end up being even more important than Moog, Cordell said. “Bob Moog was not a musician and these guys are musicians,”  Cordell said. “So the things they create, musicians appreciate so much.”

Along with being musicians, the Dewans have additional skills perfectly suited to the invention of instruments. Leon is an electronics and physics nut. Brian is a visual artist and an expert in woodwork.  

Their partnership began almost 10 years ago, when Brian showed Leon an instrument built by a friend. The instrument was broken, but Brian knew that Leon, whose father and grandfather were inventors, might be interested.

Poking around the guts of the machine, Leon, 45, recognized a sound chip used by Texas Instruments in the late 1970s.

“It was the SN76477,” the same chip that Leon’s grandfather had given him as a child and one used in some of the earliest arcade games, Leon said.

“Instead of fixing it, we decided to build a new one using the same chip,” Leon said. “And once we started talking about building one of those, the floodgate of ideas opened.”

Dewanatron instruments look and sound so unlike conventional ones that they almost have to be seen — and heard — to be appreciated.

In Leon’s front room, four wall gins hang at eye level like oversized barometers decorated with black knobs and dials. The gins are programmed to go off at irregular intervals, unleashing a burst of whirs, whistles, honks and chimes.

Standing on the floor at knee height are two melody gins; performers can twist the black dials to alter the pitch, tone, melody or rhythm of their sonic hums.

During infrequent live shows the Dewans stand at their creations like a pair of 1950s sci-fi inventors.

Sometimes they improvise live scores to silent movies. Other times they perform live sets, flicking switches, turning dials and punching buttons to release a wave of jarring pulses and beeps that coalesce to form a melody and a beat.

The swarmatron and hymnotron are particularly special because, unlike most Dewanatron instruments that seem to have a life of their own, these two pieces give the musician greater control over the sound they are making.

“You are performing on them as opposed to [their] performing themselves,” Leon said.

Unlike a conventional organ, which typically sports dozens of keys, the hymnotron has just 10.

The variety in sounds and effects comes from the myriad dials at the top of the machine, separated into categories like Justice, Nimbus and Quake. Nimbus, for example, creates a cascading series of harmonics.

Leon twisted a handful of dials, sat down in front of the keyboard and depressed several keys to produce a series of deep, regal electric chords.

As he undulated the foot pedals, the chords changed seamlessly, and then, as if from nowhere, were interrupted by the Quake effect — a flurry of electro ray-gun pops.

Finally, Leon took his fingers off the keys and the hymnotron continued to play independently, the sound pulsating like a rich, hypnotic siren.

Brian stood off to one side, his head tipped back in admiration.

“This is the kind of thing I could listen to all day,” Leon said, “because it’s kind of soothing and meditative.”

Diagonally opposite the hymnotron, balanced atop two walkers, rested the flagship of Dewanatron performances: the dual-primate console, so called because it takes two primates to play it.

While Brian and Leon perform together on a dual-primate console, they can make sounds independently of each other. But the device is set up so that the music is synchronized to the same beat. “Basically,” Brian said, “they have the same heart.”