Something strange is happening on local affiliate news programs across the country: Circuit benders and other weirdo musicians are being asked to drop by and discuss their art for the American Public.
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.
Shining, happy people bending toys. Photo by Beatrix*Jar — see our interview.
Despite the name, the Bent Festival this year promises to be about not only circuit bending, but DIY sound in general. (Circuit shaping? Circuit straightening? General circuitration?) Our friend and CDM regular Mike Una has put together fantastic art installations for Minneapolis. Workshops in NYC and LA dig into the mysteries of sensors and tubes, the potential of video bending, and giant, battery-powered noise to drown out the rest of the world. And there are gobs and gobs of performers.
Like the North American air currents, Bent begins in the West, moves across the Heartland, and into New York City. (Okay, actually, when I first reported on this year’s Bent, the dates were different, so pay attention!)
LA - April 17 - 19
New York - April 24 - 26
Minneapolis - May 1 - 3
And lest you think Bent isn’t as Bent this year, there’s still a Furby Orchestra to cap it all off.
Bent Festival site has the whole scoop, plus Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever else you crazy kids use today. (Hey! Where’s the AOL keyword?)
If you make it to any of the festivals and document — or if you’re playing/presenting — do share.
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.
Note: we are temporarily having problems with Vimeo’s embedded video. (So is MAKE, evidently, so it’s not our fault!) Click through to see the video, or enjoy the lovely garbled characters if they’re there.
Regular followers of the music tech blogs know the wild and wonderful work of bender/inventor Gijs Gieskes (here or all over here), in which Casio keyboards get massive mechanical add-ons and Sega games become fuzzy, distorted video art. Phillip Torrone writes us to let us know MAKE has taken a closer look at the artist:
In the illustrious world of case-mods and console hacking, artists and makers are re-inventing the design and function of these ubiquitous consumer electronics devices by creating hybrid systems and creative artifacts that challenge the corporate status quo. Taking this credo to an extreme with his inventive hardware projects is Dutch artist and maker, Gijs Gieskes. From casting a Nintendo Gameboy in concrete in order to build a garden path with “GameBoy Bricks” to creating an analog version of the hated spinning cursor in the Mac OSX operating system with “Spinning Beach Ball of Death”, Gieskes’ work and live performances are an inventive look at how closely entrenched we’ve become in the world of glitchy hardware and scrambled noise producing machines. MAKE recently caught up with Gieskes to discuss his practice, philosophy, and exactly how important the current crop of hackable consumer electronics might be to future generations.
The author of the interview, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, is an artist himself, so for a little meta-interviewing, check out Regine interviewing Jonah for we make money not art.
Of course, if you’d like to challenge the likes of Gijs and think your bending kung fu is better, get applying to this year’s Bent Festival.
And if you’re in London, MAKE also points to what looks like a really cool toy bending workshop there. Let us know if any of you go!
Ed.: Circuit bending too destructive for you? Don’t let that scare you away from this year’s Bent Festival, in NYC, LA, and Minneapolis. Key pioneering circuit benders like founding artist Reed Ghazala are quick to argue that bending is a creative, not a destructive act — though some more radical benders might disagree. You say creation, she says destruction — let’s call the whole thing off: this year, handmade instruments and art of all kinds are welcome, say conference organizers, who are…
… continuing to open the Bent Festival to performers and artists that create their own electronics as well as to those who hack, bend, modify and destroy them
Full details:
The Tank is currently accepting proposals for Bent 2008: The Fifth Annual Circuit Bending Festival:
I’ve always been fascinated with the evolution of species. Ever seen those bizarre, short-lived organisms in textbooks, the ones that look like they have twelve eyes and a hundred really tall legs and a spindly tail that serves no purpose? I feel the same way about new instruments, interfaces, and music software. Sometimes it’s the evolutionary aberrations — whether practical or not — that are the most interesting, and that perhaps tell us the most about the more dominant species. (Hello, guitars.) And with an open door policy for DIY instruments, we’ve seen some wonderfully unusual experiments at the Handmade Music event series along just these lines.
Continuing our performance series, with assistance from Make Magazine and Etsy.com, we had some special guests last Sunday at openhousegallery in SoHo, New York: the Mister Resistor Ensemble. Headed by Ranjit Bhatnagar, the inventive sound artist who brought us robotic Theremins and MIDI ironing boards, this group of students from Parsons is lucky enough to spend a whole semester building fun instruments with hardware and software. The results are clearly experimental, but that’s the point. Some informal video clips:
Tired of conventional instrumentation? How about toy robots named Freddy and Teddy, a violin with a bow made out of cassette tape, and a synthesizer assembled from a 1960s electric guessing game?
We have a special guest performance for the next Handmade Music party, organized by CDM in New York with Etsy.com and Make Magazine. The Mister Resistor ensemble features various musical oddities — electronic and acoustic — created by students at Parsons The New School for Design.
The course is taught by Ranjit Bhatnagar, who’s been a regular at Handmade Music with robotic Theremins, MIDI ironing boards, and other alternative instruments. Ranjit explains how the course works:
Background: for the last few years I’ve been teaching a studio class in Parsons’ department of Design & Technology (that’s the multimedia & physical computing department). The class is called Mister Resistor, and it’s about making homemade instruments and performing with them. I introduce the students to circuit bending, simple acoustics, synthesis, and the like, and get them making and playing their own instruments. The “final exam” for the class is a public concert. Last year’s class did their concert at the Flux Factory gallery in Queens, in the midst of a giant sound sculpture I’d worked on.
I know we have other instructors out there, so if you use similar techniques in your class (or would like to), let us know about it!
I’ll be flying all the way from Australia back to New York to co-host Mister Resistor on Sunday at another installment of Handmade Music. Various other reasons this one is special:
I’ll be hosting a free workshop using a ribbon controller electronics kit from PAiA Corporation. Even the kits are free to makers, until we run out. (More on that kit and how to get it wherever you are soon.) You can do the whole thing without soldering, even if you’ve never done this before.
It’s in Manhattan, not in Brooklyn — our friends at Etsy Labs hooked up a fantastic space in SoHo called openhousegallery, 201 Mulberry Street near Spring Street.
It’s in the afternoon (2-5p), rather than at night. And you can still catch the NYU ITP show Monday. (Just go; you’ll understand.)
As always, if you’re in town, stop by and bring your own projects for show and tell if you like. (Hint: they don’t even have to function properly. We’re relaxed like that.)
Once again, that’s Sunday, 12/16, 201 Mulberry Street in SoHo, completely free, you’ll hear great music, and you’ll learn to make electronics without soldering even if you never have before.
Speaking of events, there’s been so much awesomeness and I’ve been so very much in Australia that I’ve gotten way behind, so apologies about some cool events I didn’t get up. I would be remiss, though, in not pointing to another ensemble, partly because you can go while I’m in a 747 over the Pacific, but mostly because I hope by second semester we’ll have massive battle of the band competitions between these things. NYU’s own NIME ensemble after the jump.
Oh, and to the 95% of readers not in New York, a calendar for CDMworld is definitely in the works so we can share the love.
Beatrix Jar is Bianca Pettis (Beatrix) and Jacob Aaron Roske (JAR). The duo teaches workshops on Circuit Bending and performs live with an eclectic set of gear including an AM radio, bent Speak ‘n Spells, drum machines and samplers.
I met up with them in Minneapolis last week to discuss their new album Golden Fuzz and their approach to musicmaking. They’re an enthusiastic twosome, finishing each other’s sentences and eager to illustrate their ideas by firing up a piece of gear and making some excellent sounds.
Golden Fuzz may be the most accurate album title I’ve seen all year. It’s a shimmering mosaic of beats and samples layered with a smattering of live vocals, samples, circuit-bent toys and AM interference. The tracks flow and build organically with a distinctly human element. A jazz-like approach and bent electronics interact with crisp beats and found samples in a way that tells a dreamlike story, impressionistic and a little funky. It’s a bold and refreshing approach to digital musicmaking, taking chances and letting elements of unpredictability and in-the-moment decisions guide the process along. This is a fun, lush album that draws from a wide and rich palette of sounds, and I recommend that you check it out.
They’ve got a great live/work space in a building populated entirely by artists, writers, dancers and the like. It happened to be Jacob’s birthday while I was in town and they invited me over to discuss art and music, and have some food, drink and an impromptu jam session.
Note: All the entries were excellent, and we have a little prize lined up for all of you, not just these top picks. *See below for details
It was very hard to choose three winners from all of the entries- the variety and quality of submissions was amazing. So, we tried to select those that most embodied the spirit of the contest- creativity, within a set time limit, and using only those materials that can be scraped together quickly.
And that didn’t narrow it down much. It was a tough call to be sure, and it makes me think that we’ll be seeing increased stiff competition next year. So, while these three will receive a special prize, we’ve got something lined up for everyone who participated.
Without further delay (ahem), here are the top 3 entries in no particular order:
George Lazenbleep’s Mini Furby:
El Colin’s Bent Guitar:
And Squelchbox’s “The 15 Puzzle”:
Since I forgot to do this at the beginning of the contest-
everyone who entered, please use the createdigitalmusic contact form and send us a message containing the following information:
Your name
Your display name
The piece you submitted to the contest
Your address and contact info (email is fine)
I will be in touch to make sure you receive your prizes in the mail.
Thanks again to everyone for participating, thanks to our generous prize-donating benefactors, and let’s do this again next year!
Circuit-Bending Challenge winners to be announced shortly
This is just a quick note to say that the winners of the Circuit-Bending Challenge will be announced shortly, now that I’m back from a short vacation and online.
No, we didn’t forget about you and all your hard work.
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