Inside the weird and wonderful world of Look Mum No Computer

Inside the weird and wonderful world of Look Mum No Computer. Sam Battle had always dreamed of running a museum dedicated to the restoration of obsolete technology. Battle has acquired the sort of devoted cult following usually reserved for obscure Scandinavian jazz musicians or men who restore steam radios in sheds. His speciality is the improbable marriage of music and deeply eccentric technology — a world in which ordinary household objects are apparently denied the right to remain ordinary for very long. The Look Mum No Computer persona began life as a side project while Battle was fronting the mid-2000s indie almost-were Zibra, a band that hovered briefly and hopefully around the edges of fame before dissolving into the great British tradition of “promising acts who nearly made it.” When the band finally split in 2016, Battle disappeared enthusiastically down an electronic rabbit hole of his own making. On YouTube, he became a sort of cheerful laboratory goblin, dismantling everyday technology and reassembling it into things nobody had previously thought necessary — turning Sega Mega Drives into functioning synthesisers, for example, or converting Henry vacuum cleaners into devices that appeared alarmingly capable of starting small industrial incidents.