Bent 2006 rocks, rewires toys in Manhattan

David Knowles Public Relations Manager

Max McCurdy is waging war on a toy drum machine, and the drum machine is losing. Badly. Its guts lie strewn about on the table in front of him, and as he rips out the machine’s plastic-coated wiring and reattaches it to the circuit board, it lets out a high-pitched screech.

“What the fuck is wrong with this thing?” McCurdy yells as he throws his screwdriver down on the table.

To the casual observer, it would appear that everything about this situation is wrong. But to visitors of Bent 2006, the International Circuit Bending Festival held in Manhattan from April 19 to April 23, electronic carnage has never felt so right.

According to Wikipedia, circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage, battery-powered electronic audio devices—such as guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers—to create new musical instruments and sound generators.

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council was packed last weekend with dozens of tweakers hunched over the innards of Tickle Me Elmos, Furbies and Speak and Spells, filling the space with a sound that lies somewhere between a car slamming on its brakes and fingernails on a chalk board. Seasoned benders and professional musicians lead a handful of workshops, including Hardware Hacking, Building a Square Wave Tone Generator, and Circuit Bending for Kids of All Ages.

McCurdy delved back into the drum machine while Mike Rosenthal, co-founder of Bent and artistic director of non-profit arts center The Tank, tested a projector for a performance later that evening. Bent also featured performances by some of the most respected names in experimental electronic music.

“We wanted to feature a type of electronic music that was more accessible and more transparent, something that everyone could get a handle on,” Rosenthal said, explaining why his organization chose to base a festival around what has been, for over 40 years, an obscure mode of musical output. “It was important for us to have a space in Manhattan to do this,” continued Rosenthal. “We wanted to open up this opportunity for everyone.”
Rosenthal and The Tank have had a great deal of success in spreading the bending gospel, hosting in-house workshops at MTV Studios with Reed Ghazala, the father of circuit bending, and carrying Bent into its third year.

Despite bending’s burgeoning public profile, its total sonic unpredictability assures its continued relegation to the fringes of musical culture. But the knowledge that people like Rosenthal are working hard to teach people like McCurdy to reach under their beds, pull out their childhood toys, and wrest gut-wrenching sounds from them, is bizarrely comforting.