If you thought those public pianos were cool, just wait till you come across a Fono. Yalp, a Netherlands based sport and play equipment company, has placed these solar-powered, public, free, outdoors DJ booths in parks in the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, and Australia.

All a user needs is a portable device that plays music (like that iPhone you have in your pocket). Press play, place the device so that the speaker lines up with the Fono’s “pickup place” (aka a microphone), and you can get to work mixing your own public dance party. The table utilizes 14 touchpad surfaces that can control things like pitch, delay, flange, scratch and others, as well as looping and crossfading. Deep House Amsterdam (via In The Mix) points out that there are no EQ knobs or beatmatching pitch slides, though you can “automatically sync tracks and cue/pre-listen to your mix-in track over your headphones.”



Yalp even went the extra mile, creating entire environments for these DJ stations. “Hangout spots” come in a variety of configurations, including ones for skate parks, sports areas, and even specialized parkour courses. Most of the spots come with skater-friendly benches, railings with roof shelves, and dance floors with included vertical wall.

It’s all rather neat, and there’s a solid mission statement behind it all to boot. “Teenagers, they tend to be a hard target group to design for,” reads Yalp’s Fono website. “In a lot of cases they are generally seen as a noisy, scary, rude, polluting problem. Looking at the public space you will see they are put away in boxes, both figuratively and literally . . . You can [be annoyed by] them or you could approach them in a positive way and take advantage of the things they enjoy doing. Being a DJ and music lives with youngsters. Fono brings back the DJ that once started on the streets back to the streets.”

I can see this backfiring with annoying kids blasting obnoxious mixes across public parks, but I suppose that’s why they started it in Europe first. (There’s also sound directing technology in there, so that’ll help.) Still, it’s an undeniably cool concept, and no doubt a Kickstarter will pop up soon to get one of these stateside. Watch a demonstration video below, and head to the Fono site for more information.