Few artists have taken the DIY attitude to the limits as successfully as composer, improviser, inventor, luthier, and designer Hans Reichel. For his most recent CD release, Yuxo: A New Daxophone Operetta, Reichel built the instruments, wrote the music, recorded and mixed the songs, created the Flash-based Web site, and designed the fonts used in the CD packaging and Web pages.

The German-born artist first gained notoriety in the '70s as an improviser playing highly customized guitars. A consummate craftsman, Reichel began building his own stringed instruments — which occasionally featured multiple bridges and necks — from exotic woods. The results are as sonically unique as they are visually striking. His most important invention, however, is the daxophone, a collection of elaborately shaped wooden sticks played with a bow and a fretted wedge. The instrument has an animalistic vocal quality, and Reichel enjoys creating choruses of these voices for his compositions.

Reichel's Web sites are peppered with images of the daxophone. The site based on his CD Shanghaied on Tor Road, www.daxo.de, offers the visitor a friendly, gamelike experience. But unlike many Flash-oriented Web sites that feature empty displays of the technology, Reichel's uses Flash to slowly reveal aspects of his work, as well as his wit, including photos and sound files of his instruments, interactive games, and musical sequences with animation.

“I've always liked animation,” explains Reichel. “As a graphic-design student in the late '60s, I made some short ones. But the technical possibilities were quite limited at that time. Some years ago I was introduced to the classic computer game Myst, which has inspired me quite a bit. I made my first interactive game using Macromedia Director, but it's much too big to put on the Web. Now I use Macromedia Flash, a vector-based tool that enables me to create complex structures which require very little memory.”

Reichel has created a site for his latest release (www.yuxo.de). Although under construction as of this writing, it already features a wider variety of sounds and new animations in the style of Terry Gilliam.