Motherboard TV: The Father of Circuit Bending: Reed Ghazala & NY Fest

via motherboard.tv

This is part of Motherboard’s Sound Builders series that they are running in celebration of Bent Festival's kick-off in Brooklyn today.

"This particular installment takes the Motherboard team to the 'Anti-Theory Workshop' of Reed Ghazala, the father of circuit bending. It’s a nice timely tease for this awesome New York electronic music and arts fest.

With Ghazala as our guide, we navigate the history of circuit-bending sound art from its accidental beginnings in his childhood bedroom to the discovery's lasting impact on electronic music and art. Host Jordan Redaelli even has a shot on the tinkered toys, creating a duet with the legendary circuit tweaker that is unique to say the least."

"In 1967, Reed Ghazala discovered something amazing just by sitting at his desk.

At the time he was a broke teenager, musician, and experimental artist known to friends for his magnetic sculptures and the sort of pyrotechnic displays that once sent him into emergency surgery. And then one day in 1967, his desk began to emit strange sounds. He recognized their sci-fi whirrs and electronic tones as something like the sound of the expensive synthesizers of the day, and he was sure he wasn’t imagining it.

The source turned out to be nothing more than a toy amplifier he had left in a desk drawer, its wires exposed due to a broken case, its power still switched on. The toy’s innards were short circuiting against the inside of the metal desk, and in so doing were making music that neither its creators nor its owner could ever have imagined. Circuit bending was born.

Today thousands of amateur electronics hackers around the planet follow Reed’s lead, customizing or simply breaking their synthesizers, children’s toys and other easy-to-crack-open gadgets with the hope of generating uncanny and wonderful cacophonies of sound..." Full post on motherboard.tv.

Update: I just created the Bent Fest label and added it to a ton of posts. Check it out for a trip back in time and to get a taste of some of what you can see at the event. Note there are a couple of general circuit bending fest posts as well.