Feature – Circuit Bending

If you want an emotional and exaggerated account of circuit bending, it’s birth and development, describing how one man has been employed to make music by lots of rich people who are too lazy to write albums, please follow the corresponding links. However, this blog does not intend to resurrect the corpse of a dead man who used to play with machines, just so you can get off on the fact that you know more about circuit bending than Joe Bloggs.

Fortunately, hip circuit benders (is it acceptable to call them that?) Modified Toy Orchestra manage to make music from these crude machines without being dead or self-affirming. Whilst artists such as Kid Carpet exploit the lo-fi novelty of using children’s toys to –unsuccessfully- flog records and gig tickets, Modified Toy Orchestra obsess over their instruments. In using toys, the sound recreates childhood phenomena producing entertaining yet disturbing results. Onstage they resemble a pack of Humbert Humbert’s (no, not the DJ…well actually, maybe. But that’s not the point is it!) rather than the perhaps intended Kraftwerk.

What’s perplexing is that once they have bent enough circuits, destroyed enough toys and soldered the equivalent of a Henry Moore, how do they develop sound into song? For an interview with Pascal Wyse in the Guardian, bandleader Brian Duffy explains, “It all has to come from what the toy offers…but you bring compositional skills to the process.” – Whilst not being very informative, it does explain the cause to the effect of a varied and surprisingly affecting output.

Modified toy Orchestra performing freeno and olaf. Live in Serville, March 2007

You can find out more here and here