Using sawed-off baseball bats is the same sort of inventiveness as using a washboard for percussion. Technology opens up even more types of invention, such as John Oswald's, our own Ed Special's, and innumerable others' magnetic tape manipulations, Christian Marclay's vinyl cut ups, Bob Ostertag's CD manipulation and Nicholas Collins' trombone-propelled CD player. Pre digital analog synthesizer technology is a unique combination of a science and sound. Early synthesizers were bizarre waveform generators made of circuit boards and resistors. Their mad cap creators took the advances in electronics and gave them an artistic portal.
Electronic music has a long history of innovation.
From Raymond Scott's Electronium and the early Dada machines to Theremin's and Moogs innovations all the way up to the Aphex Twin's strange hand soldered circuitry, electronic music has always pushed the envelope. A former electronic engineering student, Richard James set out to electronically reinvent the incredibly organic sound of the Aboriginal Digeridoo by building his own sound synthesis devices. In the machine fetish genre of techno, James takes the existing givens and rewires and permutes them. By creating unique instruments James lives up to the potentials of his imagination by expanding the possiblites of his instruments. His incessant drive to expand the boundries of manufactured, pre set machines is an example of successful personal expression by reimagining his instruments.