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Music

Get Bent With Reed Ghazala [Video]

Our friends from Motherboard.tv just posted a video of their recent interview with Ghazala on the advent of this year’s Bent Festival.

Last week, we premiered our new Instruments of Change column with a feature on Reed Ghazala—aka the father of circuit bending—who actually discovered the technique by accident when a broken toy’s exposed wires started short-circuiting inside his metal desk.

From then on, Ghazala went on to invent hundreds of musical tools (including the Vox Insecta, Ghazala Thereglyph, and the Ectoplastic Morpheum to name a few), all based upon the idea of customizing and modifying existing electronic devices. Though he’s also an author, designer, and photographer, his pioneering musical machines are what he’s come to be known for. He’s inspired a whole subculture of playful sonic inventors who break apart the old to actualize the new.

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Our friends from Motherboard.tv just posted an intimate interview with Ghazala in his workshop on the advent of this year’s Best Festival. They say:

One barometer of circuit bending's reach is the annual Bent Festival, where legions of tinkerers, knob twisters, performers and fans come together for three days to tear apart electronics, solder in unlikely places, and share their hybrid creations with a wider audience. (See Motherboard's coverage of last year's Bent Festival.) This year's fest, which starts June 23rd in Brooklyn, features workshops, video screenings, art exhibitions, installations, and music performances that will, well, bend your mind.

Though historically associated with noise music, circuit bending has also informed more mainstream musical genres like industrial, electronic and glitch, and become a close confederate of the video game hacks of chiptune music. And even more conventional musicians have been known to partake in the sonic experiments of bent electronics: Reed himself has built custom instruments for musicians like Tom Waits, Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, and The Rolling Stones…

Read the rest of the article over on Motherboard.tv.

If you have any questions for Reed about circuit bending, Bent Festival, or anything that squeaks and squeals, he’s currently answering questions on Reddit.