Florian Waldner

The Handydandy * consists of five Media-artists from Austria (Bauch Bernhard, Gross Luc, Kirisits Nicolaj, Savicic Gordan, Waldner Florian) making music on their mobile telephones instead of using usual Music-instruments. The mobile Telephones are used only as interfaces and they are connected, via Bluetooth, to a computer network, a virtual opposite to the “human network” music-band.

* The name of the Band consists of the words Handy; this is the German term for mobile telephone, and Dandy.

The poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that an aspiring dandy must have “no profession other than elegance. . . no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons. . . he must live and sleep before a mirror.”

We also got some coverage in the Wall Street Journal (May 29, 2007):

“Some musicians have already taken cellphone music to an extreme. An Austrian rock band called the Handydandy named itself after the German term for mobile phone, handy. The band, which performs at electronic arts festivals in Europe and elsewhere, has done away with ordinary instruments altogether. Each member of the quintet straps a Sony Ericsson handset around his neck like a guitar and taps away on the buttons, making all the facial and bodily contortions of an Eric Clapton or Carlos Santana while producing very different results.

The group’s cellphones, sometimes attached to Styrofoam cutouts shaped like guitars, are linked wirelessly to laptops a few steps away. Pressing keys triggers the nearby computers to play a cacophony of distorted sounds and digital beats. The group refers to its cellphone-powered blur of electronic noise as “Bluetooth Rock,” a reference to the popular wireless technology.”