Circuit Bending. Haven’t we all as kids played music by banging teaspoons on long glasses or by blowing on the top of bottles filled with water, or realised that something could sound amazing, although it was not coming from a conventional instrument and didn’t know how to capture it? This playful need to create new sounds and video from found objects, especially from random left-over electronics, is probably what has given rise to circuit bending.
The circuit bending technique was discovered in 1966 by Qubais Reed Ghazala. Circuit bending is a creative customization of electronic devices, often involving random chance discoveries. Different electronic devices are used, like low-voltage, battery-powered children’s toys, electronic musical instruments, guitar effects, digital synthesizers, old televisions and monitors, and other discarded electronic products, that create new sound generators, musical, and visual instruments. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling the original device or machine and altering its circuit by adding or removing components.
Circuit bending techniques have been commonly associated with noise music. Conventional contemporary musicians and groups have regularly experimented with such instruments, often adding modern techniques like sampling and further editing to produce effects that are very difficult to produce conventionally.
Why is it great?
When you venture into the auditory world produced by circuit bent electronics, you enter a world that no longer adheres to the normal human presumptions in musical theory and circuit design. Thus, great new sounds and musical realities can occur as you sit and listen to the metamorphosed output of these out-of-theory instruments. A circuit bended instrument is truly an alien instrument that exists nowhere else in the universe and that presents sounds no one else has heard yet.
ARTIST IN LIMELIGHT
In line with the circuit bending Spirit, Moritz Simon Geist’s music ranges from robotic music performances to robotic sounds installations, but not only. A performer, musicologist, and robotics engineer he started producing his own sounds mostly because he wants to invent the future of electronic music.
On his Instagram he shares weird and wonderful acoustic inventions such as the seashell robot below.
Geist’s music doesn’t start from a synthesizer or emanate from his computer. He’s “the world’s only techno producer playing entirely with his self-made futurist robots,” as the press release for his new EP, Speculative Machine, puts it. Glitchy tones on a track like “Maschyn” might come from a circuit board he printed himself. Sizzle sounds that listeners are accustomed to hearing from cymbals instead arrive from controlled bursts of pressurized air. The eerie melody of “Entropy” literally utilizes one of the oldest forms of a DIY instrument: water glasses filled with liquid to produce different tones, only this time they’re played by a motorized set of mallets. And unless you see him performing live—as several new fans did during Geist’s seven-performance run at SXSW 2019—you may never know something extraordinary is taking place.
