Since I’ve been prattling on about music for the past few weeks, I thought I’d share a little of mine with you. Here’s a whimsical short film, set to one of my recent recordings:
I extracted the video images for Mermaids of the Pterodactyl Cult from an old sci-fi movie called “Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women,” now in the public domain and part of the Prelinger Archive. The movie centers around male American astronauts who travel to an alien planet where they kill a pterodactyl and lose a robot, but never discover the aquatic hotties, who’s lives they forever alter. I reused the best part of the old movie, and sped it up substantially. I love the way the sea roils at this speed and that seemed to work with the roiling rhythms in the music. I hope you will check out all of my music, and many more music videos, at my music blog: www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com
It’s been a while since I’ve written about my music, and I’ve built up quite a backlog. I make music that is just as obstinately original and out-there as the opinions I cultivate, because the conventional music of this culture is just as dead as the ideas it was founded upon. I make my own music because I want to hear something that I only hear bits of in other people’s music, and I like music that challenges the listener, and traditional musical ideas. I’m not interested in preserving musical traditions, I want to make music for a very different future.
Still, I am a product of my time, and when I was young and the future looked bright, synthesizers were brand new and seemed to me like almost magical devices. Back then, I liked what Edgar Froese, Morton Subotnik, and Klaus Schulz did with them much more than I liked what Walter Carlos, Kieth Emerson or Patrick Moraz did with them. I liked the people who explored synthesizers on their own terms, terms like millisecond and frequency, rather than those who played more or less traditional piano music on these new instruments. I still enjoy that early psychedelic electronic space music and you can hear that influence in a lot of my music.
Tom Robbins reminds us that “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” so I recently did something I’ve wanted to do since I was 15. A couple of years ago I created the GeoSafari Modular Analog Synthesizer, a crude but unique electronic musical instrument that I built from scratch. I’m sure I told you about it.
When I was 15, I was in my first extra-curricular musical project with some of my friends from school. We called ourselves, “Raw Sewage” and we sounded almost as good as our name. Two of my band-mates in this ensemble built their own synthesizers. At the time, I was not at all impressed by these machines. They didn’t look anything like musical instruments. They looked like something a 15 year old would build in his dad’s workshop, out of scrap wood. They had loose wires dangling from them, and looked like they could fall apart at any moment, but the thing that made me most skeptical of these machines was that they were powered by a 9 volt battery.
Back then, I knew that all “real” rock-n-roll gear plugged into the wall and weighed a lot, and these machines did neither. They sounded terrible too. The machines seemed to be very unpredictable, and even the guys who built them, couldn’t figure out how to make them work most of the time. When the machines did make noise, they seemed as surprised as the rest of us by the noises they produced, and none of them sounded very good.
Still, as a teenager, I had friends who built their own synthesizers, and shared their PAIA catalogs with me, catalogs full of synthesizer kits you could build at home. I thought it would be a cool thing to do, but my own early attempts at soldering did not go well, so I focused on other things. Before long, I met someone who had a “real” Moog synthesizer and discovered that it sounded almost as ugly as the machines my friends had built.
Eventually, I bought a Roland SH-09 monophonic analog synthesizer for myself. I figured out how it worked, and learned to play it. I discovered that synthesizers really need reverb to sound good. The reason synthesizer music sounds so spacey has as much to do with the artificial acoustics added to them, as it does with the signals the instruments produce. Ironically, I got rid of my Roland when I went off-grid, because it required AC power, while everything else I now use runs on 9 volts DC.
Years later, however, when I decided I wanted a new synthesizer, and I needed one that could run on 9 volts DC, I knew I could build it myself because if Phil Casey and Andy Izold could do it, when they were 15, I could do it too. So, a couple of years ago I built the thing, and for the last couple of years I’ve been exploring its musical potential. Today, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but I know that a lot of what it can do is sound really awful.
Once in a while, however, it sounds pretty good, at least to my ears, and lately I’ve been getting a little better at it. I have assembled a collection of some of my favorite electronic realizations from the GeoSafari Modular Analog into a new album. I call the album “Vintage Star Traveler” because it reminds me of the golden age of science fiction. It reminds me of a quaint, optimistic vision of rocket-ships and space stations, and technology without limits.
I don’t hold out much hope for such a future, or even think it’s a good idea, but I do feel nostalgic for that time in the past when it seemed possible. Primitive analog synthesizers helped conjure those visions of the future, and fueled the idea that technology would change everything. Now that technology has changed everything, the GeoSafari Modular Analog takes me back to a time before we knew how badly it was all going to go.
I made a video to go with the title track from the album. To create the images for this video, I recycled some old video feedback and experimental footage I shot back in the ’90s when I did more video work. I like the way it came out. The video has a rather retro psychedelic look about it that, I think, matches the music. Please check it out.
The album contains more than 58 minutes of dreamy, futuristic soundscapes created with the GeoSafari Modular Analog Synthesizer. I find the whole album quite relaxing and energizing, and I like the way my brain feels when I listen to it. I hope it does the same for you. You can listen to the whole album and download it for free here:
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll remember that I went kind of gonzo about circuit-bending this past Spring. After about half a dozen posts, I realized that not many of my readers could relate to my interest in rewiring children’s electronic toys. So, I dumbed down my posts to encourage the idiots among you to keep reading, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve lost interest in making music with creatively modified, cast-off electronic toys.
Quite the contrary, over the summer I created a number of circuit-bent instruments from electronic toys I found in our local thrift stores. While not every toy I bent, worked out as well as I hoped, enough of them survived surgery that I now have an array of amusing looking, capable, and unique sounding of synthesizers at my disposal.
While most electronic toys designed for children are nearly bullet-proof, they all share one weakness. One substance has probably stopped more electronic toys from ever working again than any other. This substance corrupts them from the inside, like kryptonite does to Superman. That substance is pee.
According to my extensive research, fully half of all electronic toys found in thrift stores, contain pee. Sure, they’ve cleaned the toy off. You can’t see any pee on it, but set it down in front of your dog or cat. They’ll let you know. Of course, when you open the toy, you’ll find it. Usually, it leaks through the keyboard, or the buttons, and directly onto the little membrane switches beneath them. This causes keys not to play, and functions not to work. Sometimes you can fix these problems with a thorough cleaning, sometimes not.
The worst case pee scenario happens when pee gets all over the main circuit board. Such was the case with my beloved Bratz drum bra. The cups of the bra channeled cat pee directly onto the main circuit board where it dried to an oily, foul smelling film and proceeded to corrode everything. Despite that, the device continued to work, at least long enough for me to add a pitch bend control and a line out, which actually made it into a great sounding instrument. Since then, however, it works only intermittently.
Now that the sun has disappeared behind the hillside, leaving my photovoltaic panels unkissed by sunlight until next March, and thus bringing my summer soldering season to an end, I’ve begun exploring the musical potential I’ve unleashed in these newly altered devices. Allow me to introduce you to a couple of them:
Introducing; My Circuit-Bent Casio ML1
This amazing little instrument pleases me greatly. Stock, it actually makes some pretty good sounds, including a decent imitation of a piano, and it still works as originally intended. However I’ve added a matrix of touch sensors which allow me to directly stimulate the electronic “brain” of the ML1, releasing its previously untapped potential for composing original music of apparently infinite variety. I enjoy collaborating with the ML1, a relatively young composer, and very much a product of the digital age. As a composer, the ML1 speaks to the age in which we live.
I titled our first collaboration 13 Minutes at the End of Time. The modified ML1 generated every note, phrase, rhythm and noise heard in this piece. My input came only in the form of touching the sensors that I added. Touching any two of these sensors at the same time, creates a new connection within the ML1’s electronic “brain”, causing it to “think outside the box” with surprising originality.
Like many young composers, the modified ML1 favors quick tempos and complex poly-rhythms, but it balances them with subtle textures and sustained notes that float serenely over the fray. I think this piece reflects the relentless sensory overload and chaos of our wired lifestyle. At 13 minutes, it runs a little longer than the typical modern attention span, but some of us still know how to listen. 13 Minutes at the End of Time also provides the perfect ambiance to induce stress into any situation.
Pretty in Pink
I found this pink “girly” toy keyboard at a thrift store around here. Although it had a few splashes of pee inside it, it cleaned up easily with no damage to the electronics. This toy says “Starring Me” on the front, but it looks identical to this “Barbie” toy keyboard bent by Bogus Noise UK, and immortalized in this video. I presume I have the generic version of the same toy.
I took a different approach to this toy than did the braceletted British bender who bent the bejeezus out of that Barbie brand Bontempi. I started with the ubiquitous pitch-bend mod. This is one of the easiest, and most universal bends that you can make on an electronic toy, especially the cheap ones.
Almost all of theses little noise-making electronic toys, use a single resistor to set the speed of the central processor. If you change the resistance of that resistor, you can make the whole machine operate faster or slower, which in turn, raises or lowers the pitch of all the noises it makes. You will usually find this resistor located right next to the black blob in the center of the circuit board, often labeled “R1”.
If you touch this resistor at both ends, the toy will usually go up or down in pitch dramatically, or stop working all together. If you replace that resistor with a potentiometer, you can use that potentiometer to sweep the pitch of the sounds up or down. This opens up a lot of new potential sounds for you to exploit.
In this pink girly keyboard, I used one of the purple ornamental flowers as the knob to adjust the pitch. The three switches on the lower left, allow me to switch even more resistance into the circuit, which allows me to play the keyboard in four distinct registers, with the pitch-bend knob active in all of them. This four-speed pitch-bend mod extends the toys range by nearly an octave above, and several octaves below, it’s original voice.
I made one other major modification to the sound of this pink girly keyboard. I added a passive ring modulator. A passive ring modulator adds a very weird kind of distortion, and it allows you to use another signal to change the harmonic profile of that distortion in very strange ways. Q Reed Ghazala shared this schematic of a passive ring modulator on his Anti-Theory website.
It looked pretty simple to me, consisting of two transformers and four diodes. Even I could handle that. For the secondary, or “Y” signal, (that modifies the original or “X” signal) I built an analog square-wave oscillator from an 8-pin “555” chip, relying on the instructions I found in the Crème DeMentia “Bending Buddy” comic book. Everyone interested in circuit-bending should check out the Crème Dementia kits and comics.
Both circuits fit easily on a 2” square piece of circuit-board, and inside the toy. The “Y” oscillator has an independent on/off switch with an indicator LED, and a pitch control knob. Another knob blends the “Y” oscillator with the “X” signal. You can see the switch and indicator light between the two purple flowers on the upper right, and the control knobs located to the immediate right of the keyboard.
I displaced one of the ornamental purple flowers to make space for a quarter inch phone jack that serves as a line-level output, but I re-purposed the flower as the pitch-control knob. I added three tiny LEDs to the handle, to make my new instrument extra pretty, an amber one in the center, flanked by two red ones, because I had them lying around. The red ones came out of a small power inverter that burned out, and the amber one came from a disposable led tea light, with a dead battery.
How does it sound? Th passive ring modulator give this toy a very biting and aggressive sound, reminiscent of a an old Farfisa organ through a fuzz box. The analog oscillator feeding the “Y” oscillator dramatically alters the harmonic character of the sound in real time, with a twist of a knob, not unlike an analog synthesizer, and imparts an authentically analog Theremin-like sound on it’s own.
I composed this rather abstract, obtuse, but somehow endearing piece entirely with the newly modified pink girly toy keyboard. It reminds me of some of the electronic music popular in sci-fi movies of the sixties.
As you can see my enthusiasm for circuit-bending has not waned. I hope at least a few of you enjoyed this look at a couple of my new instruments. I built these instruments to force me to think about music in different ways, and I hope this approach will lead to some interesting and hopefully compelling music in the coming months. Stay tuned.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 