If it ain't broke then bend it!
Channel: Cheryl Northey
Date: 2012-07-15

Circuit bending refers to the inspired short-circuiting of battery-powered children's toys or instruments to create new musical instruments which bleep, squelch, blip and screech. 

Cheryl Northey caught up with two of Germany's very own benders before they headed off to the international Bent Festival in Los Angeles.

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Do you remember the Speak & Spell? It came out when I was a kid. It's a red plastic battery-powered educational toy. You push a button and this synthesized voice says:

SFX Speak and Spell.

But that was before Joker Nies got his hands on it. 

O-Ton Speak & Spell (eng):
"And now we give it some kick (Say it..freim ...gargle...fade under)"

That garble - the Speak & Spell's new alien vocabulary - is what Joker Nies calls "circuit bending". I am sitting with him in his workshop cum music studio in Cologne. There is electronic gear stacked to the ceiling all around us. Wires are sticking out everywhere and the smell of solder is making my eyes water.

Even though Joker Nies is an electrician by trade -- he calls himself a musician. But while some musicians use guitar picks, Nies grabs a screwdriver when he is getting creative. He cracks open electronic toys like the Speak & Spell and rewires them to make strange noises that he calls music.

One of his toys is an electronic autoharp from the 1980's called the Omnichord. It looks like cross between a giant bean and a beige coffee table with buttons. 

O-Ton Joker Nies playing the Omnichord (eng):
"So first we'll hear what the Omnichord normally sounds like (cheesy drum patterns) so that's what it can about do. So let's see how it sounds if you use some of the body contacts (cheesy into crazy distorted noise "Yeah, there's a lot of screaming and moaning."

Joker Nies makes the sound by placing his huge hands on a series of round metal buttons that he has wired to the Omnichord's casing. The buttons are actually the conductors at the end of an open circuit. And when he plays, he is part of his instrument. Literally.

O-Ton Joker Nies (eng):
"I developed the instrument into something that you can play with body contact, which means you make connections between certain points on the circuit board so you can play it with your hands, you are part of the circuitry" 

This modified Omnichord is Nies' instrument of choice when he plays in his band, called Die Schrauber -- or in English, the Tinkerers.

(MUSIC: die Schrauber) 

Electronics in 80's were much simpler than today. Take for example, the first home computer, the Commodore 64. The number 64 stood for a whole 64 Kilobytes of memory. Today, most new computers have around 1 Gigabyte of memory. 

I spotted the gutted and burnt out computer casing of a Commodore 64 in Simon Schäfer's attic in Frankfurt. Schäfer like Joker Nies is also a circuit bender. He studied Electronic Media and Arts at the University for Arts and Design in Offenbach, near Frankfurt. Every wall of his studio is covered with industrial shelves jam packed with broken pieces of electronic equipment. There's so much stuff that I had to pick a path through the wires and push aside a melted laptop to find a space to sit down.

O-Ton Simon Schäfer (eng): 
"About 50 percent of those things lying around are damaged. It's a mixture between birth, cradle and graveyard and they kind of mix up peacefully (laughs)."

But it's not just junk. Schäfer uses the parts for more than just "bending" sound -- he's getting visual too. He manipulates the images in video games, using a Super Nintendo Entertainment System that came out in the 90s. He has rewired the system and added buttons on the outside of the console. 

During his live performance, Schäfer projects the shooting game Wolfenstein 3D on a big screen. And when Schäfer starts pushing buttons, the gun suddenly disappears and the screen image fragments and eventually dissolves into pulsating blips and shifting patterns. As he plays, he gets that glassy-eyed glow of a kid completely mesmerised by a video game. 

O-Ton Simon Schäfer (eng):
"It's something compulsive. I just have to open it and just go and I think it's about the thing the first moment of having those chessy sounds being transferred into something totally different. It's a whole new world to explore and a whole new instrument to explore."

Cheryl Northey, Deutsche Welle Radio