Metal Machine Music involves making bespoke metal artefacts of varying complexity; designing machines to mechanically excite them; prototyping power amplifiers to effectively drive the former; and synthesizing the signals fed to the latter. In this fashion Metal Machine Music becomes a playground for an expanded compositional process that extends across lutherie, metalsmithing, large-signal electronics, mechanism design, empirical acoustics, and audio synthesis.

Metal Machine Music affords performance, exhibition, workshopping, and other hybrid ways of artistic showcase and open-ended research. The core question the project revolves around is how to employ DIY metal artefacts and DIY (metal) machines so as to transduce electricity into acoustic vibrations. On the electricity side of things, the artist typically uses a Serge Modular system to generate audio signals of varying complexity, as well as several DIY PWM motor drivers. Other signal sources are sometimes used on occasion.

The artist has designed, prototyped, and constructed a 1000W multi-channel large-signal power amplifier especially for Metal Machine Music. By way of this instrument, he can distribute monophonic audio signals to the various individual instruments. Each of the latter has its own characteristics in terms of input impedance, current handling capacity, sympathetic resonance, frequency response; accordingly, the individuals modules within the amplifier have been designed so as to achieve maximum performance in terms of power and desired bandwidth.  Everything has been made from scratch following a several months long period of experimentation and prototyping.