A Look Inside the Strange Musical Laboratory of Blue Man Group

Rolling Stone took a look inside the strange musical laboratory of Blue Man Group where co-founders Chris Wink and Phil Stanton show off some of the inventive and wild instruments the group has created for their shows.

For 25 years, the Blue Man Group has blurred the thin blue lines between music, theater, performance, visual art and invention. As a percussion-based spectacle, part of their appeal has always been primal banging on knotty tangles of PVC tubes, the furious whipping of airpoles and the thunderous pounds on a big drum they lovingly call “the Big Drum.” Their mostly instrumental third album, Three, just released on Rhino Records, is a feast of such sonic ingenuity, a showcase of home-brewed instruments like the snorkelbone and the chimeulum honking and sparkling over rhythms redolent of contemporary EDM.