"DJs are always arguing about which medium is better, vinyl or laptop," says designer Yuri Suzuki when I meet him in his studio in Hackney, a small room full of electrical parts, tools and shelves groaning under a weighty vinyl collection. "I wanted to make a point about music being something physical."
His latest work to make this point takes the form of a glossy black globe, clamped in a metal vice. It looks like a ball of dark matter, an oily orb held in suspended animation, something mined from the depths of space awaiting testing.
Suzuki presses a button and the orb begins to spin, emitting a crackly sequence of noises, as if the globe is channelling some garbled communication from a distant galaxy.
This is The Sound of the Earth, a spherical vinyl record. It is played by a stylus that runs longitudinally down the side of the globe, tracking a continuous groove that spirals around the circumference from pole to pole. On its journey, as it scans across the continents subtly inscribed on the black surface, it plays a surreal mashup of field recordings taken by Suzuki on his travels, along with fragments of national anthems and folk music from around the world.
"I'm always travelling," says Suzuki – just back from Sweden before jetting off to Belgium, followed by Oslo, Lausanne and Tokyo. "I take a dictaphone wherever I go, and this project was a way of bringing all these sounds together."
A film about The Sound of the Earth by Alice MastersHe has been working on the idea for the last three years, developing software that allows him to map the sounds on to the 3D surface, and recently devised a spherical track cutting machine with the help of engineers in Tokyo.
The project follows on from a series of works that play with the physical properties of music, an interest that came out of an accident with his laptop.
"A few years ago my hard drive crashed and I lost my entire 500Gb music collection," he grins, looking surprisingly liberated by the idea. "From then on, music held in physical objects seemed safer."
His graduation project from the Royal College of Art comprised a series of studies that looked at different ways of playing conventional records. Sound Chaser was a Scalextric track made from pieces of old vinyl, around which little stylus cars could run. His Finger Player allowed you to play records through a stylus strapped to your finger, letting users feel the sounds they were playing.
Since graduating in 2008, he has gone on to build everything from animation machines to dancing robots, as well as a room-sized contraption that put together a cooked breakfast from scratch.
"Each project is trying to educate people about the way things work," says Suzuki, although it seems that performance outweighs pedagogy in much of his work. As part of his current residency at the Design Museum, he has been developing an electronics kit for children in the form of an interlocking puzzle that explains the principles behind circuit boards, as well as a radio whose electronics are based on the layout of the London tube map.
So what's next?
"I get approached by really strange clients all the time, wanting really crazy things," he says, somewhat nervously. "Sometimes I wish I could fix on one direction."
I hope he doesn't. The power of Yuri Suzuki's work lies in his promiscuous appetite to cross disciplines – from electronics to film-making, performance art to education – using these multiple media to bring us his uniquely sideways view of the world.
