Cathedral of Junk

Austin, Texas is an odd place. So odd in fact, that “Keep Austin Weird” is virtually the officially recognized slogan of the city itself. The place is packed full of artists and art, musicians and the instruments behind them. In fact, there’s a shop on 6th St, at the heart of downtown Austin, where you can buy a guitar-shaped toilet seat, complete with sunburst finish. Among the strange are many really interesting and creative people, each exploring and giving back in their own way. Sometimes a guy just wants to build a towering castle of steel, plastic, glass and all manner of other glorious scraps that modern progress and consumption has wrought in his own backyard for over 20 years. And sometimes a guy has to fight for the right to keep what he’s built when the powers that be come along and tell him to tear it all down. Meet Vince Hannemann, the “Junk King”, and welcome to his amazing Cathedral of Junk.

Located in the South Congress area of Austin, Vince’s Cathedral of Junk rises at least 30 feet into the sky amongst the towering trees in his backyard and probably weighs in at well over 50 tons up to three stories tall. The entire structure is built from a mind-blowing collection of old TVs, car parts, machinery, building materials, appliances and an endless host of scrap, parts, objects, toys and stuff, from commonplace and identifiable to inexplicable and perplexing. In an epic tail of defiance and grit, the local government tried repeatedly to close him down and force him to tear down and haul away the Cathedral, but he refused to back down. After a few years, a few lawyers and some seriously fierce tenacity, Vince prevailed and acquired a proper building permit and with it, the bona fide right to keep on building ever onward and upward.

We met up with a few local friends for a little field trip and picked, pulled and prodded the structure to find a few dozen unique objects and surfaces to bash some cool sounds out of with drumsticks. This library includes playable multisample instruments of the coolest and most musical oddities we found, edited and programmed with precision for maximum playability and musicality. It covers everything from old cymbals and refrigerators to saw blades and artificial legs. The final result is a grand old scrap-heap orchestra!