Modified Toy Orchestra / Quarta 330
Modified Toy Orchestra
Hard drives and fluids don’t usually get along, unless a way can be found to amplify and acoustically alter the sounds that emerge. Then there’s a good chance of being welcomed to the circle of “circuit benders.” Circuit bending is one of the trashy disciplines of multimedia art whose intention is located somewhere between the original impulse of all critique, the desire to get to the bottom of the essence of things, and the anarchic pleasure of using things against their original intention. Toss out the instructions! The forefather for this targeted misuse of everyday electronics is Reed Ghazala, who in the mid 1960s expanded the sound palette with DIY electronics for musicians and bands like Tom Waits and the Rolling Stones. Since 2004, the scene has been holding a Bent Festival each year at the end of April in New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. Alongside these variants of circuit bendings, rather situated in pop culture, there have naturally also been numerous benders in the tradition of the avant-garde, starting with artists like Nam June Paik, who during Fluxus also short circuited music and fine art with one another. John Cage’s use of everyday electronics in musical happenings marks a border zone. Above all, DIYers like the pianist David Tudor and ensembles like Musica Elettronica Viva have undertaken fascinating shifts in their performances between trash and beauty. Their successors are artists like hans w. koch or Yasunao Tone, whose works demonstrate that human software is still in the position to win over the perfidies of mechanical hardware.
But circuit bending is particularly interesting when performed live. One example here is the British musician Brian Duffy, who with his Modified Toy Orchestra spans a bridge between consumer culture and composition. As a performer, there is something of a test pilot about Brian Duffy. His spaceship is the stage, his fuel old electronic toys, his drive to tickle the unconscious out of these materialized dreams of childhood. A veritable power plant or Kraftwerk—and his commitment to that band is shown not only by their low-fi cover versions —is erected before the mental eye when Brian Duffy and his band step onto the stage. In suit and tie they go about their business with a robot-like precision (here too, the link to Kraftwerk is palpable).
Combining sacred earnestness, plastic electric guitars, and play consoles. The hairdo of a long legged miniature blonde, elaborate from a distance, reveals itself to be a refined construction of electronic contacts. Her diodes are standing on end. A monkey is lying on its stomach with its back open, as if for a vivisection, and a couple of wires are sticking out of the plastic body that houses its soul. The baby phone bawls out its bad night story. Put in such sober terms, this all might sound like a childish joke, good for a party with media school students. But in his performances, Brian Duffy not only reclaims for electronic music the degree of unpredictability and technological anarchy that has disappeared with the laptop, as he noted in an interview. He also allows the soundtrack of the rubbish heap of consumer culture to emerge from the cheap sounds of a child’s room. The suppressed rumpus of the robot voice shows the true face of pop.
Patrick Hahn
http://www.myspace.com/toyorch
Quarta 330
The first time we heard Quarta 330 was on a twelve inch released by the British label Hyperdub. Steve Goodman’s label, the home to acts like Burial or Kode 9, is one of the pioneers of dubstep, alongside Tempa, Tectonic, or DMX, and most certainly can be called the most progressive of all dubstep labels. For there was never really a genre-typical sound on Hyperdub, the releases are all just a bit expected, daring hybrids with genres like reggae, hip hop, house, or electronica, and thus guaranteeing exciting new possibilities, or better, the blurring of the supposed sound identity of the young genre. Whenever dubstep has been identified by fans and journalists as having a certain sound and tempo (for example, wobble bass, jackhammer beats, and extreme deceleration), Hyperdub’s releases point a way out of this deadly act of final categorization. The same is true of Tokyo’s Quarta 330. Kode 9’s famous “9 Samurai” is considered one of dubstep’s foundational tracks, what could be a more logical next step than to release song in the Hyperdub philosophy from the classical prison with a remix in new garb? “Nintendo Gameboy, Moog the rogue, Akai mpc0.5k, Dsi Evolver, Jomox xb09, M-Resonator, Lo-Fi Delay and me,” these are the components for the sound, according to Quarta 330, who up until now has released two Hyperdub twelve inches (“Sunset Dub / 9 Samurai Remix”; “Sabacco / Homeless”) along with a Flying Lotus Remix (“Auntie’s Lock / twelveInfinitum”) on Warp Records.
And when Quarta 330 says, “I want to know what dubstep is, what chiptune sounds like,” and then finds himself with Spartan gameboy sound in close aesthetic proximity to the Leipzig label Jahtari. With digital equipment and a consciously “cheap” Atari Computer sound, in recent years Jahtari artists like Disrupt have insured an exciting and equally comic and deep redefinition of dub at the intersection of reggae and dubstep. As Disrupt once explained, “It’s about using the ‘weakness’ of computer-made music in a positive sense. A computer will always sound like a computer, because the offbeats come from a trashy freeware plug in. But so what? That lends it all a certain charm of the incomplete. And the old standard sounds have already been tried out x number of times, why not try something else?” Quarta 330 practices this philosophy in an even more extreme way. The misuse of everyday electronic tools like Nintendo Gameboy as a musical instrument reveals itself to be an artistic strategy. The other consists in restricting himself to the sound spectrum of this tool, which can only be considered “poor” in regard to the infinite potential of today’s electronic means of production. The effect is all the more powerful.