Thereminimum

Theremins are wooooo-eeeeeing everywhere this week: The new "special edition" of Tim Burton's Ed Wood has an extra that shows how the theremin was used in Howard Shore's score; in Friday's Guardian, musician and thereminist Bill Bailey previews a radio doc, Good Vibrations: The Story of the Theremin. Theremin, he writes, immediately roused the suspicions of the KGB—or rather, the equivalent at the time—who regarded the device as a state secret and monitored his work very closely. Or, more likely, they thought he was a weirdo who might do something stupid, like try to magnetise Lenin.