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Bent Festival 2010

Танцпол · 02.06.2010

By Vtol

Dmitry Morozov (http://www.vtol.tk/), one of the members of the collective Love Live Electronic, on the main festival of sound hackers in New York...

Bent Festival is a kind of Mecca for all Circuit Benders, makers of homemade electronic musical instruments, sound hackers and sound experimenters. Every year dozens of musicians and builders from all over the world gather in New York to make some noise, show off their instruments and exchange ideas, soldering irons in hand.

I'd heard about this festival a very long time ago, but couldn't even dream of taking part in it. In the end it turned out to be a very difficult, but extremely interesting trip...

First, corrections that threatened the complete failure of the whole undertaking were introduced by the unpronounceable Icelandic volcanic fart, which paralysed plane-flying over Europe and part of the Atlantic - for two days before the flight I kept an eye on the weather reports and the arrivals-and-departures board, but Delta was flying reliably. I calmly headed to the airport, went through a heap of checks with my wildly suspicious kit, consisting of 14 homemade synthesizers, controllers and so on + a heap of wires and all sorts of gadgets... the flight was cancelled 30 minutes before departure. I only managed to fly out 2 days later - many of the fest's participants from Europe never made it there at all.

Having flown out on 19 April instead of the 17th, I lost just 2 days and made it in full to all the days of the festival (even with time to spare).

The main date it runs on is the weekend from the 22nd to the 24th, but the preliminary events began as early as 20 April with a lecture by the German performer, builder and synthesizer historian Derek Holzer. He spoke about the history and principles of synthesizers built on various conversions of light into sound - loosely speaking, «optical synthesizers». Credit where it's due - he lectured and demonstrated superbly, especially considering that 80% of all the work in this field was done by Russian (Soviet) scientists and engineers, whom he, unlike the tendency accepted in the West to downplay the achievements of our minds, not only didn't disparage but, on the contrary, extolled, and expressed a desire to finally come to Moscow to play the ANS synthesizer (on this device E. Artemyev made the music for the films «Solaris» and «Stalker»). My presence as a representative of the Russian nation and a subject constantly nodding along with Derek throughout the lecture sowed in the minds of the American gentlemen a doubt about their total hyper-coolness in synthesizer-building. Naturally, most of the materials about the Russian engineers, including unique video files, were obtained by the lecturer from Andrei Smirnov of the Moscow Theremin Center.

Lecture announcement

Derek has a very interesting site, telling both about himself and about the history of «optical synthesizers» and «drawn sound».

On 21 April preBent took place - an intimate event at which participants of past Bent festivals performed. That day I was absolutely blown away by the performance of Lesley Flanigan (Lesley Flanigan) - a fragile girl with a beautiful voice, skilfully operating homemade wooden resonators fitted with speakers and microphones - a true feedback girl! - here's the video of her performance at Bent 2009.

Besides performances and lectures, the festival also included master classes and workshops on bending and DIY - and there were both very simple master classes - for beginners, lasting just a couple of hours, and quite long ones - 6-7 hours for advanced benders. I didn't take part in any of them, because I didn't manage to sign up and the places were limited... A full list of all the master classes that took place is on the festival site, and on the whole they fell into two categories: 1 - bend some bit of junk (for beginners) and 2 - assemble a KIT. I can't say I was interested in making any of this, since there weren't really any new topics for me in most of the projects. Nonetheless, I'd like to single out one workshop that offered the chance to build a truly interesting and unusual instrument - Peter Edwards aka casperelectronics: The Benjolin. A rather expensive workshop costing $150, but having listened to the Benjolin, I became convinced that it really was worth it, and it's impossible to buy, because the creators distribute it only through master classes. More about this Benjolin.

Besides that, there were several rather interesting installations at the festival, including interactive ones. I especially liked the work by Brendan O'Connell (Brendan O'Connell) Listening Piece for a Selfish Ensemble. It was a web of many wires stretched between four posts. All the wires were connected to a large board with a heap of operational amplifiers, and the spectators were handed small devices with a speaker and an antenna. Holding them to your ear, you had to use them for contactless listening to the signals travelling along the web - awesome!!! (noisy awesome!!!)

In terms of the choice of participants, the organizers deserve praise - they managed to gather a large number of musicians and projects connected in one way or another with DIY and circuit bending, but from absolutely different genres, scenes and categories. From almost academic and theatrical performers to punks, pop-noisers and techno freaks. The result was a cool hodgepodge of many different projects, interestingly shuffled across the days in such a way that each new performer complemented the broad front of DIY electronics culture even more.

A pleasant thing was the almost complete absence of characters poking at a computer - out of roughly forty projects playing live sets, the apples glowed on no more than 3-4 of them, who, compared with the general mass of live performers, were churning out feeble heresy. These non-TRU characters were constantly subjected to the sidelong glances of the rosin-scented benders. In general, at the fest you could feel a real alternative to the mainstream tendencies in electronic music - lots of different projects, all with homemade instruments, unusual music and the (electro) energy emanating from the performers.

Of course, by no means every performance could be called outstanding, yet a number of performers simply blew my mind. I'd long wanted to meet Peter Edwards (Peter Edwards) in person - I've followed what he does for many years. It turns out Peter is also an excellent performer; of everyone who played he probably had the smallest setup - just a couple of DIY devices, and yet for 40 minutes he churned out powerful drone themes (perhaps his secret was precisely that same Benjolin he was using).

Naturally, a fest like this can't happen without representatives of the Land of the Rising Sun - the Japanese Adachi Tomomi (Adachi Tomomi) fully matches the image of the crazy electro-kamikaze that has firmly stuck to all Asian benders. Some of his devices had motion sensors built in (light sensors and gyroscopes) - he held them in his hands and jerked about like a worm on a frying pan!

In addition, Derek Holzer, whose lecture I already wrote about above, surprised everyone with an incredibly colourful and unconventional performance - his optical and light machines look advantageous and striking on stage (a multitude of little lamps, flashing lights, transparent discs spinning on electric motors, photo flashes). He placed them on an overhead projector, in which he used coloured film filters, creating an incredible visual sequence.

I also liked the concept of the Italian project Action Potential - they plastered a dancer with a heap of sensors that reacted to muscle tone and were connected to a DIY synthesizer. In this way a kind of fusion of contemporary movement with experimental electronics came about - it looked rather striking.

On the whole, I have to note the high level of build quality of most of the devices the performers played on, and this applies both to the electronic guts of the devices and to their design. Absolutely everyone was surpassed by Gennon and his Toy Volcano.

Some projects had such advanced instruments that it was even a bit of a letdown - it became unclear where the DIY ended and where something from KORG began. Of course, this demonstrates the high level of their creators, but it deprives things of some of their point - why make what you can buy in a shop; with skills like that you could make far more unusual things...

One memorable thing was a table where any of the participants could put something up for sale - from discs to homemade devices (I picked up a heap of vinyl with the wildest noises and a couple of circuit-bent devices). So as not to arrive at the festival empty-handed, I made these Russian style noise-matryoshkas -