Reed Ghazala is a self-taught, self-executed, self-exiled multi-media artist. As the explorer of these pages will quickly discover, all of Reed's work --visual, audio, musical instrument design and writing-- reflects an unusual thinking-space. Reed not only bends the rules; more so, he makes up (and publishes!) his own. Perhaps this might take shape in musical instruments that conduct electricity through their players. Or those that are controlled by hand shadows and produce chance music. Fantastic landscapes of never-never worlds might rise out of reconsidered film stock. Digital mediums might resolve at atomic level. The visitor will find technical theories and art mediums turned inside-out.

  
The Vox Insecta

Reed's sculptural experimental instruments have been built for Tom Waits, Peter Gabriel, King Crimson's Pat Mastalotto, Faust, Chris Cutler, Towa Tei, Yann Tomita, Blur and many other interesting musicians. Reed's work has been covered and requested throughout the arts "underground" and the major media as well, including ABC Television, The Discovery Channel, MTV, Disney, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L. A. Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, The Music, Wired Magazine, Option, Billboard, Time Out, Stereophile, The Smithsonian, The ReR Quarterly, Sound on Sound, Computers & Music, Japan's Sound and Recording, and many others. Reed's twenty-article series "Circuit-Bending and Living Instruments" is now being published and translated around the world. Along with many private acquisitions, Reed's work has found its way into the NYC Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Whitney permanent collections as well as numerous other public galleries worldwide.

This web site will present several hundred examples of Reed's work, from quick mail art to involved, dedicated studies. But beyond a presentation of finished work, this website, in the spirit of what will be looked back upon as the internet's birth of the free cyberprofessor, also attempts to teach technique.

 

Reed Ghazala is now known internationally as "The Father of Circuit-Bending", a self-discovered and amazingly simple electronic process of creating experimental musical instruments from pre-existing audio circuitry. Following Reed's writings, and without any prior knowledge of electronics, people everywhere are following this new art form, this new standard of audio exploration, and are designing their own fantastic instruments. This website contains much information devoted to teaching this, the process of circuit-bending. .

 

The Dworkian Register

As an author, Reed continues to donate his mind-expanding series about the circuit-bending technique to his publishers around the planet. This set of writings covers all of Reed's major instruments and details the basics of the art while also exploring esthetic problems of experimental music. "Circuit-Bending and Living Instruments" began with its first installment in 1992 within the pages of Experimental Musical Instruments magazine. The series is being quoted and re-published internationally.

Reed's audio compositions have, over a 30 year recording history, appeared on more than sixty music packages from CD to cassette to vinyl. This work spans 1960's cottage industry distribution through the seminal "tape underground" of the Cassette Mythos projects to artist-released fine-art collector's CDs to established avant-garde music labels.

 

Reed is also a long-time experimental photographic artist. His studies have included original techniques involving lens-free imaging with dye-migration materials, cross-axis polarization in time-exposure, modified cameras, home-built lenses, both stationary and moving home-built filters, modified films and pyrotechnic light sources/subjects. Videography and cinematography including 2-D and 3-D animations are explored as well.

Landfall

As an illustrator Reed's work involves, besides the traditional line-art of pencil and pen, techniques involving composites and retouching, photo copy alteration, reactive paints, special washes and inks. This work continues to be published internationally in magazines, books and music packages.

 

Reed's designing with electro-lumia began in the mid-1960's. This work now includes diode and glass tube laser displays, short and long wave ultra-violet, paint-engraved and dyed incandescent, liquid, smoke and gel chambers, reflection/diffraction mobiles, various front- and rear-projection schemes including polarized light through moving ice and mineral crystals, mechanical and gas strobes, musical light beams, color organ design, small neon arrays, plasma generators, cold light strips/panels and assorted LED devices.

Other works might be based upon magnetic sculpture, radio control, robotics, architectural models, rocketry, kite and balloon design, or even pyrotechnic explosion art. Reed has also, for decades, practiced in the field a found-object placement art. His own ritual or Feng Shui of sorts; a guerrilla art where natural materials are collected in passing to create remote mobiles or locking keystone sculptures and placed to inhance an environment, remaining then in the deep woods to be experienced only by forest animals.

 

Reed is, too, a peaceful outdoors person, a canoeist, an avid mushroom collector, kitchen and campsite chef, wild animal lover and rescuer, unique musical instrument enthusiast (with nearly four-hundred musical devices in the collection), strange art and book collector, rock hound, amateur meteorologist and hobby botanist.

But also Renaissance artist-scientist. Alien technician. Guesswork romanticist. Blundering recluse. What is sure is that Reed was born with an adamant drive to explore imagined secrets, as you will see revealed within the various pages of this website. From being blown unconscious onto the surgeon's emergency table to periods of self-exile in the wilderness, Reed follows his arts and continues to push at strange doors.

 

The Sound Tent

This web site will open some of these strange doors. It will reveal to the visitor a wide assortment of Reed's differing projects, from obtainable music and instruments to obscure imaginary worlds that can be witnessed only through Reed's unusual techniques. Explore, enjoy, and watch as this web site grows and changes. We have much more magic in store...