XLR8R INTERVIEW (intro) Cameron Macdonald of XLR8R magazine interviewed Reed Ghazala while researching the article "Accidents Should Happen" for the November 2003 cover story. Here's the interview including insight into BEAsapes, glitch, alien instruments and circuit-bending's place in electronic music. Links to XLR8R and Cameron are below. (interview begins) -First off, what are you building for the Stones? Few people know that Keith Richards digs experimental music. He and Tom Waits, who owns a bunch of my bent designs, jam on cow fences and so on. Keith's getting an Aleatron. That's a keyboard circuit-bent to produce chance, or aleatoric, music. Very, very cool things happening here. Chance music via circuit-bending is fascinating. It's outrageous and, at times, even exquisite. It's our first true alien terrain to explore - an environment very foreign to us, not of our intention and not the environment of our upbringing. The saucer HAS landed; music is its language. It's said that flying saucers have buzzed Jagger numerous times over the years. An alien instrument for Mick seems long overdue. Mick will be getting my chief alien music engine for vocalists: an Incantor. That's a circuit-bent Speak & Spell, or in this case a Speak&Read, its ROM loaded with lots of human speech sounds for circuit-bending to transform into alien musical song-language. Here, again, the program routines are rearranged by the creative short-circuit into new musical, and oddly vocal, compositions. Too, with Incantors you have an endless source of strange new music forms to explore within the looping function as phrases of abstract vocal/music sounds are repeated. Unusual meters are expressed in odd musical arrangements here, a new one each time the circuit-bending loop button is pressed.  It's like an alien music box but with a library of songs you'll never get to hear all of... there are just too many possibilities. This comforts me and makes me smile. The bent Speak&Read produces a lot of vocal aberrations. I think Mick will find it interesting. I was a rock drummer in 1968, the Stones being one of the bands we covered and that I learned to play drums to. My wooden Ludwig drum set was finished in "pink champagne sparkle". The Stone's Aleatron & Incantor instruments will be a matching set - in pink champagne sparkle. -How long have you practiced Circuit-bending? Since the mid/late '60's. It was over 1966-67 that I discovered the art and developed that first circuit into my first bent instrument, the Odor Box. A 9-volt transistor amp shorted-out in my desk drawer making all kinds of interesting sounds (see it in the prototype gallery online at anti-theory.com). I thought - if this can happen by accident, what can happen by purpose? I've been circuit-bending ever since, non-stop, thirty-six years. Two things very important to the art happened over this period. First, I was invited by Bart Hopkin to write for his wonderful magazine, Experimental Musical Instruments. It was in EMI, in 1992, that I first published my term "circuit-bending". Twenty articles were written in EMI over six years, the last in 1997 (EMI's last issue). It was this series of articles on bending that brought my research out into the light for a wide audience. The second big event, circuit-bending having become a kind of secret music science by then, was the turn-of-the-millennia launch of our anti-theory.com website. It was preceded by a simple instrument gallery within a prior domain along with a couple sites publishing my EMI article on how to bend the Casio SK-1 (the first SK-1 bending guide around; it's spawned a plethora of bent SK-1's since - find it at windworld.com). But the launching of anti-theory.com, with tons of instrument images and text about the art, the first bent instrument gallery and the first how-to-bend instructions online, blew the lid off. While EMI had a strong & significant international readership, the web gave access to zillions more people and most bending projects can be traced to the anti-theory site one way or another. All the other bent sites were to follow, and quite swiftly as people wanted to either promote the art or simply cash-in on it (bending seems to have created the king of all cottage industries). Circuit-bending became a wildfire art out of this exposure ...but not due to this. It's hot due to things intrinsic to the art itself. What is says about music. The intrigue of the sounds themselves. The demystifying and ease of electronic design. The political and cultural aspects. Even the tantalizing search through which bending is accomplished. All this is exciting. -Key inspiration for C-bending? The sounds. While the search is really fun, and feels like digging in a gold mine, it's the unusual musical nature of bent instruments that still drives me on. Imagine me, a penniless teenager in the 1960's, drooling over Silver Apples' Simeon and the early Moog sounds, the Columbia-Princeton mega-synths too, knowing these things were way cool but way outside my reach. Then I short a toy amp and these sounds, even wilder, are immediately at my fingertips. I was just astounded. As time passed I got ahold of Moogs and all kinds of nice synths, normalized and patch, and even built an early computer-controlled polyphonic keyboard: voltage controlled modules patched together but under the control of a programmable processor, to experiment with codes to create chance music. A kit, the PAIA P4700-J was very nice, especially with programs bent a little. But through it all, it's circuit-bending that provided me with the most intriguing sounds to work with. Of course, in the end it's not one sound or voice versus another. It's what a voice says emotionally, bent, non-bent, electronic or acoustic. Circuit-bending simply adds a new category of voices to electronic music: a chance-prepared or chance-adapted instrument, vast as this new category is (compare it to chordophones or membranophones of the world: endless). -How do you employ C-bent instruments into your music? Lots of ways, just like any instrument. As the composition suggests. This might take the form of a single bent instrument as solo amidst more traditional instruments (as my early Odor Box performances, in the '60's, accompanied by bass and lead guitar where the audience wanted to destroy the instrument and kill us). Or a bent "section" might be recorded using several similar bent instruments (as in, say, the woodwind section of the orchestra). My Secret Garden recording would be example of this style. For that matter, an entire bent orchestra can be created using many different bent instruments, or just with one if versatile enough as in my Vox Insecta, an insect voice synthesizer. In my Threnody recording I did just that, creating orchestral sections and even choirs by playing this antique Stenograph-housed instrument in various of its voices. No limits or preferences here. It's wide open. While a new field and still being defined, composition is always a matter of similar invention: you imagine the thing, and the tools and parts become clear. You then get as close as you can. So great visions are rendered in the Braille of concerto, of pitch sets or soundscape, still wonderful with the curtain drawn! -What are the best examples of C-bending you've seen? What are their sounds? If someone new walks through the door and wants to be introduced to circuit-bending I usually drop an Incantor in their lap. This is because it presents fine chance music, as said before, in endless variation. It's an unbeatable introduction to what circuit-bending's about (read my online how-to to the end and then enter the lightning bolt for instructions on building your own Incantor!). Too, I like many different Aleatrons. They're full of surprises. From the simple Casio SA2 (ab-so-lutely great!) through the SK-1 to the more elaborate Yamahas and such, these are often amazing. The sounds range from strange tonal aberrations to deep experimental chance music. My Vox Insecta is a fantastic surreal orchestra simulator. The Trigon Incantor is in a world of its own as you roll the large steel balls around on the "lizard skin" to produce on-going streams of chance music variations. Photon Clarinets are very cool: you play them with shadows as you wave your hands in space. And body-contact instruments such as the Morpheum, passing electricity through your flesh to function, are astounding in their voices and implication. Hmmm... I was just shown an Aleatron (originally designed/discovered by Andy Ben) that Derek Sajbel, a film maker doing a documentary here, brought with him from L.A. It was great! Really nice. Of course, I see lots of original work online that seems fantastic too. This makes me very happy. There are thousands of bent instruments being created daily around the world now. Many, many, many are simply superb music engines that I would give anything to play. But, you know, favorites: it's an impossible question to answer. I have a collection of hundreds of musical instruments, bent and straight. My favorite is the one I need the moment its voice comes to me while I'm composing. I'm in love with that one then. At rest they're all like animals in a forest: unique, all beautiful and all mysterious. Maybe "mysterious" is a key word here. Bent instruments are very mysterious, adding to their animal nature. All a little insane, like people more than instruments, spewing art in seizures, like squirrel chant, independent and mysterious, quite outside the normalized instruments in the music shop. This element of mystery exists in all bent instruments and is a species trait. It endears me to them just as eccentricity does in my friends. -Where do you see C-bending's place in electronic music at large? Remember that "glitch" music or music created by software errors are now the rage-should C-bending be associated as "glitch music" too? Circuit-bending's place in electronic music? Well, circuit-bending transforms the circuit-board into an immediate canvas for anyone. This is key. Circuit-bending has brought electronic design, electronic music as well as experimental music to the common person. No prior event in history has attracted more people to experimental electronic music. This is very important to electronic music and has in fact spawned a growing art movement, perhaps the first electronic art movement of the planet, and certainly the first electronic art-object movement embraced by a growing school of artists. In a highly electronic society this is a curious landmark and to me provokes interesting questions of cause-and-effect in light of circuit-bending's technically, and even esthetically, incongruent nature. Glitch? This is a cross-over subject in many ways with circuit-bending. Glitch, whose early examples exist as visual work, can be seen in the abstract expressionist movement wherein the mechanics and act of painting (wild "action" painting and the resulting drips and runs) brought "flaw" forward as art. A better, and older, example of High Glitch can be found in Japanese Suminagashi, another chance art I practice. The earliest examples are traced to the Heian Era (794-1185). Special inks are floated on plain water. As the inks flow, solidify and tear in the subtle surface currents, extraordinary patterns emerge. A sheet of paper is laid on top of the water to "print" the changing image at the moment the artist feels right. I extend this glitch by mixing my own inks:  a chance system of color & molecular tenacity. The Japanese regarded this high glitch art as supreme. Flakes of pure gold were even incorporated and the early prints were used for the finest hand script of poetry to be penned upon. This was high art and revered by the entire Japanese culture rather than greeted with doubt as was/is much Western glitch. Needless to say, in our glitchy world of technology and artists, many other examples exist. Medicine, and all the sciences, in fact, are great glitch arts should we extend the concept a little bit. As for music, bending and glitch, there's a common connection attitude, here taken from djmixed.com... "The growing popularity of "glitch" based electronic music is bringing an older and somewhat obscure art form to the forefront; a genre dubbed "circuit bending". Circuit bending entails gutting inexpensive (and ubiquitous) electronic noisemaking toys and rewiring their innards in random or unintentional ways. By bridging unusual circuits and shorting out expected pathways, creative heads are able to create alien instruments that function within their own universe, oblivious to the rules and structures forced on music."  -Dan Elder Nonetheless, most glitch music, the glitch genre today, looks to all kinds of data & processing "flaws" from bad edit "pops" to malfunctioning CDs to bad math in programs and on and on. Glitch can be audio or visual or even linguistic (as in bent human voice synths or poetry programs). As you might guess, I'm all for it. Use of the mundane, of the lost or unappreciated, is great fuel for art. Superb. While some glitch music looks to circuit-bending, circuit-bending in itself represents a more concise universe in that here we discover and use sounds that exclusively were developed through the act of chance bending and the resultant "prepared" instrument (similar to John Cage's prepared pianos or Harry Partch's "adapted" harmoniums). It is a universe completely unexpected and, in fact, non-existent until the theory-true barrier is broached with anti-theory's clear-illogic (as opposed to fuzzy-logic) design. After all, fuzzy logic is meant to seek a norm within chaos. Bending seeks chaos within the norm. Still, in both fields, software errors = program errors. Helping programs to create errors can be done in various ways. The three primary ways I use are chance mechanical (circuit-bending rearranges digital programs by corrupting signal paths), conscious rewrite (enter bad/chance math/data in code) or interrupting a running program via live data input (I did this with great result on the aforementioned PAIA P4700-J  by pressing numeric and command keys on the data keypad while pseudo-random programs were running). Circuit-bending is, of course, a form of glitch, dating in my history back to my first instrument, the shorted-out nine-volt transistorized mini-amp circa 1966-'67 during "the Summer of Love". Today the term "glitch" is used commonly to describe the individual creative short circuits implemented in the act of bending. Hardwired "bends" and "glitches" are synonymous in the bending glossary. While I've constantly recorded bent instruments since the '60's, in 1982 I composed my all-Incantor suite, "There is a Secret Garden", a recording now considered the Rosetta Stone of Incantor music, bending, and bending-as-glitch (available for the first time on CD! contact: ghazala@anti-theory.com) Lots of people trace glitch to bending, and more directly to my early Incantor work. Persons "in the know" and hip to the history of circuit-bending recall the music I circulated, all the cassettes (!!), during the "cassette underground" of the 1970's-'80's. Lots of these tapes contained music from bent instruments. Voice Of America, Artifacts, A Watch in the Sea, Sound Theater I & II, Bring Your Room, Mind over Matter, Natural Sciences, Behind the Emotional Mask, Three Rings on the Ground, Vinegar vs. Cats,  and a few others. Many of these were compilations, in a way like sketchpads, containing experiments from current work to my earliest recordings in the '60's. I hope to re-release a lot of these as CDs soon too. -I've heard that there was a sudden rise in popularity with Circuit bending a few years ago, what do you think caused many bedroom musicians to rip open and reassemble electronic toys like the Speak and Spell? Ha! This can pretty much be traced to the launching of my website, anti-theory.com, about that long ago. I mean, prior to anti-theory.com there was no internet presence for circuit-bending. No Incantors to be seen anywhere outside of the EMI articles published years prior, in print. The main feature of the site is the how-to where, for the first time on the web, circuit-bending was taught and explained. As mentioned, owners/users like Blur and Sonic Boom have attracted attention. Peter Kember (Sonic Boom) was so impressed by the Secret Garden recording that he asked for wiring diagrams, built a few Incantors and then did the Data Rape tour/CD in the Secret Garden style. This was an eye-opener. Clauser of Nine Inch Nails. Mark Mothersbaugh. King Crimson. Faust. Chris Cutler (Henry Cow, The Residents and Fred Frith's drummer). Peter Gabriel, in fact, has one of my earliest Incantors. Lotsa good and well-known people are exploring (cool, too, that bending's more a realm than a style as this will keep it interesting forever as its ever-expanding universe is explored and new sounds found). But I'd say the real popularity is based on just regular people, musicians and artists like us, realizing that they can build intense alien music engines, all by themselves, and explore an unknown universe of sound nearly immediately and at very little cost. All of a sudden you're a creator of instruments, wild affordable instruments, instead of a user of expensive stock instruments with stock sounds, all theory-true and industry-safe. Circuit-bending is clearly neither. This is fascinating to people and word gets out. It really is a vast new musical reality to drown in. It has great charm. Anti-theory.com gets millions of hits. Though it's just a small non-corporate website it has become a demonstrator/teacher/new art gallery for inspiring loads of people to believe that they can design mind-altering electronics ...and they can! It really is pretty exciting. -Where do you see the future of C-bending? Will it hit a limit in possible sounds? In this new universe of alien music technology, even on an Incantor you'll never hear all the possible sounds. Never. That's the beauty. Legit designer  types call it the "missing link", musicologists call it "something new under the sun", and the press, "the shoRt heard 'round the world." It's electronic alien folk music, I guess, as it sings a song of a new electronic universe. I can't see an end to this new realm, only new realms within. As a fellow bender just discovering the art wrote to me, quoting A. C. Clark, "My God, it's full of stars." Circuit-bending has already produced a new, if temporary, species: the BEAsape. Bio-Electronic Audiosapian, the creature the player of a bent body-contact instrument becomes as the electricity of both bodies, player and instrument, mingle. This creature is intense in its implication of instrument/animal as a sole electronic entity rather than instrument as musical prosthetic (and as such denied organic electro-biosonic matrix, the depth of the bonding of electron, blood and music). The BEAsape has no separation between instrument and player. It is a single musical electronic animal, a new species, even if intermittent, at rest in hibernation, like a frozen insect-human waiting to thaw. But the future? Wow! Seeing as there are circuit-bending workshops for kindergartners now (thanks, Ant Macabre!), experimental music and clear-illogic electronic design being taught side-by-side with finger-painting and social etiquette, I'd say the future is promising! Circuit-bending prompts so many strong questions about art that I see a quantum leap here for many people, a forcing of aesthetic & doubt that must result in parascopic sight and keen evolution. I feel this must be very, very good. To many people it's even a light in the darkness. Thanks, Cameron, for this chance to spill some ink. My best to your readers & fellow benders. May all your projects shine! Green mold and falling apples, reed (interview ends) (contacts) Cameron MacDonald: <cameron_the_macdonald@yahoo.com> XLR8R: xlr8r.com