‘10,000 tiny instruments’: how Lego made the experimental album of 2021

With the soothing noise of its bricks clicking against one another, Lego White Noise joins the ranks of great musique concrete - and documents a potentially doomed sound

Out of my headphones comes a flow of odd, weirdly tactile sound: what could be an army of ants marching across a plain of contact mics, a landslide of scree recorded from a mile away, or perhaps the first field recording taken from Ingenuity, the tiny robotic helicopter currently flying sorties above the Martian landscape. Delicate clicks, burring friction and the waterfall-like spatiality of granular flow all galvanise my ears.

It's the sort of thing that may interest subscribers to The Wire magazine, or that an underground musician usually seen sweating over a badly soldered modular synth could make in a moment of calm. This is Lego White Noise, and while it definitely sounds like experimental music, the name makes it clear that this is the work of the world's most reputable brand".