Nicolas Collins likes to refer to what he does as “tickling electronics.” He’s been building his own musical circuits since 1972, when he was 18 years old, and since then he’s established a worldwide reputation as an instrument inventor and composer, creating complex, intricate music with odd jerry-rigged contraptions–most famously a wired trombone that worked as a sound processor, with a speaker driver instead of a mouthpiece and a homemade interface attached to the slide. He’s been a professor at the School of the Art Institute since 1999 (and chair of the sound department since 2001), and he’s made it part of his job to teach novice circuit benders how to laugh off the warning labels on consumer electronics–the ones that say no user serviceable parts inside.
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To that end Collins has just published Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge), a sort of manual for aspiring sound-art counterrevolutionaries: though the laptop has come to dominate the genre in the past decade, a radio, toy, or off-the-shelf appliance rebuilt as a cheap, intuitive instrument can still solve problems software can’t. “Computers are wonderful, don’t get me wrong,” Collins writes in the introduction, “but the usual interface–an ASCII keyboard and a mouse–is awkward, and makes the act of performing a pretty indirect activity–like trying to hug a baby in an incubator. . . . Sometimes it’s nice to reach out and touch a sound. This book lifts the baby out of the bassinet and drops her, naked and gurgling, into your waiting arms, begging to be tickled.”
Each of the book’s 30 chapters corresponds to a different hands-on project, with titles like “How to Make a Contact Mike: Using Piezo Disks to Pick Up Tiny Sounds,” “Tape Heads: Playing Credit Cards With Hand-Held Tape Heads,” and “World’s Simplest Oscillator: Six Oscillators on a 20-Cent Chip, Guaranteed to Work.”
The publication of Handmade Electronic Music is timely–circuit-bending pioneer Reed Ghazala put out his own book in 2005, and in recent years the movement has been gaining traction outside the sound-art community. Noise and experimental bands like Wolf Eyes, Kites, and Nautical Almanac all use circuit-bent instruments, and a fledgling Rhode Island outfit called Casper Electronics has supplied circuit-bent toys to the likes of film composer Danny Elfman and Fantomas front man Mike Patton.
When: Sat 5/13, 7 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marty Perez.
