This paper describes an extended intercontinental collaboration between multiple artists, institutions, and their publics, to develop an integrated musical practice which combines experimental making, performance, and pedagogy. We build on contributions to NIME which work with art and design-led methods to explore alternatives to, for example, more engineering-oriented approaches, without loss of practical utility and theoretical potential. We describe two week-long workshop-residencies and three performance-installations done under the provocative title Raw Data, Rough Mix which was intended to encourage exploration of basic processes in physical, mechanical, electrical, electronic and computational domains to develop musical artefacts that were frugal in their resource-demands but enabled the interrogation of human/non-human relationships, performativity, musical ecologies, aesthetics, and other matters. We close by elaborating our contribution to NIME as offering an integrated practice combining making, playing and learning, which is critically informed and practically productive.