Who are the people in your DIY music neighborhood?

Well, quite a few of the DIYers here on Planet Earth are converging this week in New York. Lover of circuit bending, creative electronics, and DIY music hardware are gathering for the massive Bent Festival in Manhattan, complete with performances, workshops, and a book launch. And we’ve got a special edition planned of Handmade Music featuring several artists from Bent, too, in our monthly free event. For the rest of the planet, I hope to share some of these goodies well beyond the borders of the five boroughs.

To give you a taste of the kind of work we’re doing, check out the videos here of Chiptune Marching Band, getting kids making noisy circuits for the first time and the fantastic electronic workings of Peter Edwards’ brain, plus NPR radio coverage of Ranjit Bhatnagar’s hand-crafted “Instrument a Day.”

Here are the highlights of the events.

Bent Festival, April 16-18, The Tank in Manhattan

bentfestival.org

• Nightly performances by Dr. Bleep, VBLANK, Christopher McDonald, Computer at Sea, Rhythmmemory, Playboy’s Bend, Die Schrauber, Peter Edwards/casperelectronics, E-Squared, Family TV, Devgon Ash, Ken Rei, Dr. Rek, Pixel Form, Boring Machine, Burnkit 2600, Anti Social Musik Order, plus Handmade Music veterans Lesley Flanigan, Loud Objects, Tristan Perich, and Don Miller / No Carrier … plus free beer every night at 7p.
• Nic Collins launching a new edition of his book Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking. (Can’t wait to read that.)
• Workshops on making your own Noise Box or miniRungler (sounds like Dr. Seuss), working with sensors and networks and big installations of lights that switch on and off, microcontroller programming, circuit bending, circuit design, and other Brainy Topics for beginners. There’s even a family-friendly workshop on making your chiptune marching band instruments.

Chiptune Marching Band from jamie allen on Vimeo.

And from your cheery neighbors here at CDM and our friends –

Handmade Music returns with a special Bent Edition – free, Thursday, 4/16, 3rd Ward in Brooklyn:

• “modular synth meets circuit-bent Barbie dolls. noise, drone, dance party with Peter Edwards of casperelectronics.”
• A surprise mystery instrument(s) from Handmade Music superstar Ranjit Bhatnagar, who promises it’ll be “something weird.”
• Me, with the DIY Radio Shack contact mic and some custom software, showing you how to have fun with cheap impulse-buy contact mics and make music with water
• Hopefully surprise cameos from Bent Festival’s Jamie Allen and Jo Kazuhiro talking about the circuitry, the music, and the magic of the Chiptune Marching Band
• Free beer courtesy Pabst Blue Ribbon, while it lasts

Presented by createdigitalmusic.com with our friends at music trend-setters XLR8R.com, DIY bible makezine.com, and self-made marketplace Etsy.com

Hosted by artists’ facility and happening location 3rd Ward

7:30pm, Thursday, April 16 – FREE!
3rd Ward is located at 195 Morgan Ave., at the corner of Stagg St., in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
(near the Grand St L train)
Directions
RSVP: handmade@3rdward.com

Facebook event page

See also lots more at:

casperelectronics

For more on handmade music and Ranjit’s brilliant, self-motivated hand-crafted Instrument a Day project, NPR did a fantastic piece on All Things Considered:

An Instrument A Day, Crafted By Hand [audio, interviews, and sound examples of some wild and wonderful instruments]

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.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d be a little confused and freaked out if I woke up and saw this first thing in the morning (and I lived in Ohio):

And it’s not just Dan Deacon. Dynamic duo Beatrix*Jar had a similarly awkward experience. There’s something strange about what’s going on here. The news people conducting the interviews are are genuinely enthusiastic, but there’s something not quite connecting in their approach. I don’t know if it’s an intentional lack of arts-based analysis or if they just like to keep it light & fluffy for the morning viewers, but the ultimate result is surreal.

Maybe it’s because it’s really early in the morning and these musicians are night owls? They seem a bit out of their element, trying to connect to that internal place that makes music happen, but they seem to be working uphill in that particular environment. When they do connect, the newspeople look a bit alienated and confused, like they just let a wild beast loose in their studio.

Here’s Getlofi.com’s Talking Computron and Igloo Martian on an evening news program in Madison, WI:

Don’t get me wrong- I think this trend is awesome. It feels like the media companies are really starting to get a whiff of this whole DIY-Maker-Bender movement, and they like what they smell. And really, what isn’t there to like? In many ways, this is human ingenuity and creativity manifest. People making the most of what’s around them, creating solutions instead of buying them, only limited by their creativity. It’s not just a fluff piece, it’s what got us to where we are today, and a sneak peek at where we might be going in the future.

That’s assuming that the future is strange, nerdy, glitchy and loud. I, for one, salute our future weird overlords.

Note: BENT festival 2008 takes place this week in NYC and next week in Minneapolis, and you can read all about it on the festival website.

Pristine digital technology — some people just can’t resist putting it in the service of recreating grungier, noisier sound-producing tech. Hot on the heels of Indirect-to-Digital – by-way-of-tape samples of the TR606 and 808, here are some digital recreations of circuit-bent noisemakers. Of course, I generally prefer to see circuit bending producing actual, DIY hardware — see our Circuit Bending Challenge — but it’s still an interesting exercise. (And it’s worth sampling some of this gear for live performance, especially when you can record sound before something, um, breaks. At least if it’s my project.)

Rekkerd.org finds not one, but two projects:

• Eric Beam releases Circuit Bent TR-505 samples, samples of a bent TR-505 “DeComposer”, captured “with pristine TC-Electronic A/D converters.” (What, no Marantz portable? The hardware in-progress pictured above.)
• de la Mancha releases Bent, a free “circuit-bent resynthesis” effect, with tempo-sync granulator effects, and jittering, morphing, and jittering morphing pitch. Windows VST.

De la Mancha’s stuff is great, and with some granular effects, you get a “bent” creation that can only exist in software. In fact, maybe “faux” is unfair in that case. Software doesn’t have the reputation of hardware circuit bending, and there’s not the immediacy of a contact point on a physical circuit. But you can certainly find just as many, if not more, strange and organically accidental “discoveries” when working with code and patches.