There’s a simply insane amount of electrified music happening here in the US this week:

• Bent Festival NY: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights are concerts at the Bent Festival in NY, not only of circuit bending but other DIY sound, as well. Stop by Saturday during the day for a day full of workshops. (also on Facebook)
• Thursday, Bent NY sponsor The Tank will be hosting Warper Vs. Splice, a 2-floor audiovisual collision in downtown NYC; I’ll be on music + eyethings in the middle of the evening. (See Facebook)
• Saturday, The Tank hosts the 8-bit crowd, also concurrent with Bent, at the regular Pulsewave, in case at that point you’ve had your fill of bending and higher bit depths
• Bent Festival Minneapolis does it all again next weekend (Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights) for the middle of America, with workshops during the day. Don’t miss our friends Beatrix*Jar (above) and CDM’s Mike Una giving a free workshop — get there early for one of 12 MIDI-to-relay kits to use.
• Ethermusic Festival in North Carolina won’t just have a lineup of all the world’s great Theremin players, with people like Dorit Chrysler (below), Lydia Kavina, Sheuh-Li Ong, and other important people, plus CDM readers Scott Burland and Frank Shultz doing a Theremin + lap steel duet. (Thanks to Frank for the heads-up!) It’ll also have something else…

It sounds as though Moog Music is going to officially announce the thing they’re making that involves subliminal guitar images during Ethermusic. So, if you’re there, bring a camera for any one of those reasons.

As I write this, both Moog’s and Ethermusic’s sites are hiccupping; hopefully the Evil Carolina Server Hag hasn’t gotten to them. I’m sure all is well as you read this.

Now, I’m embarrassed to admit that I can’t actually play Theremin any better than this cat. Not worse, necessarily. I’m very much on the cat’s level. Fortunately, I won’t be playing Theremin tomorrow at The Tank.

You’re not cool now? You will be, as your hands dance to the rhythm through the magical lasers.

A few moments of your playing, and nothing could possibly convince me that you didn’t grow up on the streets of Jamaica, banging oil drums you salvaged and hammered into shape.

Whoops, sorry — had to snap out of that for a second.

So, okay — it seems the beamz laser harp we saw last week comes with special algorithmic software that makes music play basically regardless of what you do. The problem with laser harps in general is they tend to the button-pressing variety: that is, you’re waving your arms around like crazy, but really the laser sensor is either off or on. (There are ways around that, but … well, not here.)

Watch closely as someone leaves their hand in front of the harp and does nothing. And this, of course, is what real instruments have going for them — that you have to work hard to play them, and that’s actually kind of the fun of it. It’s like basketball: if you just held down a button the entire game and a robot played for you, it would be easier, but that wouldn’t necessarily be better. Even as a computer game, we expect multiple buttons, and actual difficulty. If you waved your hands around and wore sunglasses and had a $600 gadget from Sharper Image and pretended to play basketball, that wouldn’t be much of an improvement, either. I’m not sure why music is excepted from this rule, but then, many things about this world provide amazement and confusion.

Yes, technically Guitar Hero / Rock Band does the same thing. Except that it has actual difficulty. And has real songs. And is fun. Whereas this is painful. And it’s about as expensive than Rock Band plus a PS3.

That leaves two questions.

Pictures of cats and blogging are a cliche — but that cliche happens to be true. And it extends down the long tail (ahem, so to speak) to our little niches. Yes, there really is a blog dedicated to pictures of cats and synths. Not weirded out yet? Via Matrixsynth earlier this month (and evidently not an April Fool’s joke), someone has made a tatoo. Very … uh, meta.

Good grief; the cats have already started making tutorials:

Assembling electronic beats, starring Convoy — a slide show

So, my question is, where are the synth and computer music dogs? Dachshunds on Moogs? Labrodoodles on Ableton Live?

And, yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m stalling today so I can get other work done. But if I had a dog, I’d contribute.

Rowlf the Dog, from the Muppets, has to at least start this out. Occasionally, he traded his acoustic grand or upright for a keyboard like the Arp Odyssey, as seen on Flickr. That’s my kind of dog:

Got some canine friend who helps you get through your productions? Let us know.

It’s impossible to continue just to make music and ignore the serious threats to our security and the safety of passenger aviation. Tightened security has focused primarily on threats from the past, and reactive measures that can only prevent existing, known dangers. You know where I’m going with this: we need to evaluate screening methods and other security provisions to respond to the significant issue of snakes on a plane. I just can’t believe no one is doing anything about these motherf****** snakes.

Cult-hit-before-it-was-even-released movie Snakes on a Plane has none other than Trevor Rabin composing the musical score, as if I needed an excuse to bring up Snakes on CDM. Rabin has had an incredible history as a musician. Born to noted classically-trained parents, he went on to co-found the wildly successful Rabbitt, recorded a significant anti-Apartheid anthem, played with Yes, and wrote their #1 hit Owner Of A Lonely Heart. He even worked with Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, and Rick Wakeman. Now, like some other former rockers (Stewart Copeland comes to mind), Rabin has become a successful film composer, with a distinct action-movie tilt. (Armageddon, Bad Boys II, Con Air, Gone in 60 Seconds — no chick flicks in there, really.) Pictured: both “Rocker Trevor” and (from SoundtrackNet’s great story on Snakes) “Composer Trevor.”

And Rabin is a Mac guy. His studio Jacaranda Studios is powered by Power Mac G5s and, evidently, too much cool gear to list. Various reports suggest he uses both MOTU Digital Performer (like Copeland) and Pro Tools (probably because the studio guys require it). It’s funny, even though audio often gets bounced to Pro Tools for compatibility, film composers really largely prefer Digital Performer to anything else out there, and it certainly includes the most film scoring functionality. If you want to get inside his studio:

Home Recording visits Trevor Rabin

Trevor Rabin Scores Snakes on a Plane [SoundtrackNet]

Don’t try to get in touch with me at 10 pm tonight, incidentally, because I will be at the first show. (Check out the official site for a fun Flash feature that lets you record custom Samuel L. Jackson messages for your friends.) And will I be disappointed when the movie is awful? Absolutely not. I’m betting on it.

I love controversy. But after a week in which US politicians were talking about World War III (or was that IV) and somehow CDM’s great comment threads wound up on the topics of whether hardware or software was better (discussion = not allowed on this site), and whether starving children would be able to eat affordably-priced laptops, I decided it was time for an experiment. Could I write an entry with total appeal and zero controversy?

I present, as mind candy for the weekend: adorable animals with synthesizers.

Ah, musical parrots. While I continue to obsess over Hatebeak, the heavy metal parrot, here’s a video that claims to show a beatboxing parrot:

At first, I thought this might be faked, but it does appear to be the real thing, and having known a few parrots, these birds will do far stranger things vocally. Via Signal to Noise, via GoogTube.

If human beatboxers are more your speed, the supremely talented Kid Beyond will be in Austin, Texas, this time doing a full-on gig rather than the shorter tech demo for Ableton he did at NAMM in January. Beatboxing parrots are a novelty; Kid Beyond makes beatboxing a serious instrument; he’s a real vocalist, and an utterly awesome musician. I got a chance to interview Kid Beyond this summer and should have that interview for you soon. In the meantime, a video from VH1 plus gig details:

You may have heard a lot about the InterWeb, a new network that magically connects people around the world through their Compute-trons. You might have heard about its powers to promote music, perhaps by an ill-researched story yesterday where I stupidly pointed to a UK artist who will go unmentioned here. (As it turns out, which I would have known had I bothered to, um, read, all of the following did indeed happen: “girl produces webcast from basement,” “girl gets fan following,” “girl makes it big,” “girl signs record deal,” “girl hires publicist.” Just in the reverse order. It doesn’t explain why anyone listened to a publicist in the first place, or which “punk rockers”, exactly, wear “flowers in their hair”, or why Sandi losing her cellphone made her want to go back, inexplicably, to both 1977 and 1969. Plot of Back to the Future IV? Moving on.)

Surprisingly, though, the mainstream music press, fawning over faux-indie Scottish pop singers and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, have missed the Web’s one major success story. Here it is. I’ve tried to translate to the language of vacuous promoters, because I know as a journalist we can really never get enough of that. Ahem. (Let me get in character for a second.)

It was in the early years of the 21st Century when a bird of a different feather got to realize a dream. His name is Waldo. He’s a Congo African Grey parrot, with a rich, silky voice that has been compared by fans to “a jackhammer being ground in a compactor.” But, unlike some parrots, Waldo wanted to share that voice with the world.

Tim’s back with another tip. Baltimore bender Peter Blasser has created oddities like the much-blogged worm-powered synth (using worms as connections for a circuit-bend patch bay; via Music thing) and bent wooden synth kits (also via MT).

But that’s not all. Blasser, aka Ciato-Lonbarseee, has plenty of other strange creations:

Many odd synths, many odd names: Blasser catalog

I love the eerie sounds of the percussive analog jacket. There’s another whole page of wooden and electronic oddities, like the “bass in a picnic basket.”

Some things can be explained. Some cannot, like these pages of instruments. Go explore and enjoy.

The crew at Remix Magazine got a chance to (literally) remix a Disney Chicken Little toy; they’ve posted the process and results. So what gear does DJ Chicken Little use?

Pioneer CDJ-1000
Allen & Heath Xone mixer
Virus Indigo keyboard
PowerBook G4 running Ableton Live

Hmm, absurdly cute, gets all the “young hens,” and has a dream rig — I have to say I’m a bit jealous. This is about the most fun toy I’ve seen since the Moog action figure. So, Keyboard Magazine, do we have a response toy?