The Circuit Bent Mind - Interview With Paul Norris of Circuitbenders.co.uk

Circuit bending is quite a perverse approach to music. What turns you on in this sound-mangling?

Essentially I guess I’m motivated by both a boredom with what is available in terms of both hardware and software synthesis and by a overwhelming urge to take things apart and see how they work. While I still love my old analogue synths and nothing will ever replace my SH101 or Korg Mono/Poly, you get to a stage where you realise that 90% of synths still use the same old oscillator / envelope / filter subtractive synthesis techniques, and unless you want your brain to start dribbling out of your ears getting into stuff like FM or Additive synthesis its time to start physically taking stuff apart to take it further. In the same way as the TB303 was never popular for what it was designed for, I like the idea that you can take a machine or toy that is essentially a piece of crap, and repurpose it or rewire it to create sounds that the original designers wouldn’t believe. I’ve rebuilt £5 toy drum machines into kit capable of kick drums that can eat the TR909 for breakfast! With a bit of work you can build entire tracks from something you’ve bought for £2 from a charity shop.

I guess to a large extent it’s the unpredictability of circuit bending that I find interesting. Even after having modded a certain drum machine dozens of times I’ll still turn it on to test it and some utterly bizarre effect I’ve never heard before will just pop out of nowhere, usually leaving me thinking ‘what the fuck was that, I wish I’d recorded it!’.

Do you come across toys or instruments that "just won't cooperate" - sound bad or don't sound at all? Or any other resistance of electronic matter?

There will always be machines that just refuse to do anything more interesting than just crash when you mess with their electronics. Although having said that, a lot of digital machines tend to produce interesting results if you actually deliberately crash them. The Texas Instruments Speak&Music is a case in point. All my instincts tell me it should be an excellent machine for circuitbending but so far I’ve been unable to get one to do anything more interesting than weak distortion effects. It all depends on the technology used and how it was implemented. Early 12 bit drum machines tend to have all the sounds stored in one simple sample chip which is easy to mess with, but as time progressed and technology got more complex it tends to be more difficult to isolate potential mods without endangering the machine itself. I wouldn’t even dream of going near some modern bits of syntheses hardware with a soldering iron.

I come across very few machines that just sound bad when circuitbent, but there are plenty of machines that are just pointless to circuitbend. You see plenty of machines on ebay with about 20 different switches and knobs that all produce very subtley different effects, when a more experienced circuitbender might have just stuck in one mod and been done with it. Again, having said that, I’m constantly surprised that there will ALWAYS be someone out there who thinks even the most useless bit of circuitbent kit is fantastic and will end up using it to brilliant effect on a track, probably in a way I had never imagined. I’ve built machines that I’ve ended up just giving away because they just refused to cooperate with the bending process and wouldn’t do anything I thought was good enough to even sample, and then I’ve had an email from someone the other side of the planet saying how they’d just got hold of this thing and how brilliant it is.

On the  www.circuitbenders.co.uk site I see that circuit bending efforts are more than just shorting boards with a piece of metal. Quite a few "mods" on some legendary hardware from Roland or Yamaha. That looks like a lot of work - is it your job or a hobby?

This is actually a job for me and at the moment I’m getting more enquiries than I can handle! I’ve never done any advertising or promotion so its mainly word of mouth via the internet or occasionally a magazine.  Enquires tend to come in waves as a link or forum post goes up somewhere on the net and people get in touch via the site. As an example I’ve had a lot of enquires about mods for the Boss DR110 drum machine recently after there was some discussion of DIN sync interfaces on some DIY synth forum out there somewhere.

I guess mods on older analogue stuff like the SH101 or FAT Freebass tends to come under the heading of modifications rather than pure circuit bending. Crashes and unrepeatable behaviour is something you probably want to avoid with an analogue synth or similar, but its still the same idea of extending the width of the available parameters or functionality.

On your website you have mentioned an impressive list of producers who use circuit bent instruments (Kraftwerk, Jack Dangers, NIN, Autechre, Aphex Twin, Damon Albarn among many others). It looks like circuit bending is a solid pillar of modern-day music. How do you see it fit in the big picture?

I’d say to some extent that circuitbent sounds are a fashion but as long as there are machines that can be bent, there will always be new sounds possible. I’ve heard circuitbent sounds in the strangest of places on chart music and commercial dance tracks. Obviously I only notice these things with that rather tragic sample spotters satisfaction you get when you listen to these noises for hours every day and can therefore probably spot the aliasing from a pitched down cheap toy under layers of sound in a top 10 pop song.

I see circuitbent sounds as just another tool in a producers sonic palette, but with more of a potential for people to sit up and take notice than you get with most sound sources. One of the positive points of circuitbending is that the sounds produced can go from subtle glitches or spot effects that could be used in virtually any genre of music, to full on crushing walls of noise that obviously have a limited use but are still equally as valid musically when used in an interesting way. Personally I’d much prefer the sound of an old woman trapped in a concrete mixer falling down the stairs, to the sound of a good synth pad any day. I can’t see any way of reproducing the former sound without circuitbending or actually going out with a mic and doing it.

Do you stop at the sound design stage or do you also produce music?

I’ve been producing my own music for many years, starting of with alternative and industrial stuff in the early 90’s and moving on into electronica and dance music. I had quite a bit of stuff released under different names but not so much recently. These days I’m getting more into the actual processes behind making interesting noises than actually producing music with the results, but I always find it fascinating to see what other people come up with using the sounds or machines I’ve produced. Most of the time people tend to use things in ways I would have never dreamed of doing.

With an impressive list of artists using bent sounds it's not hard to imagine for whom this stuff is prepared. But... any recommendations?

For people who use circuitbent kit? You probably wouldn’t go far wrong with anything by Download, or anything involving cevin key, in fact anyone who was ever in Skinny Puppy really. Jack Dangers and Meat Beat Manifesto always seem to integrate circuit bent stuff seamlessly into their collage of sound and I can’t recommend them highly enough

I tend to mostly hear bent stuff on breaks tunes I probably wouldn’t know the names of but the latest Si Begg, Lee Coombes, Uberzone and Hexstatic stuff seems to feature some interesting bent sounds, and for some gorgeous sound design Younger Brother are excellent.

Circuit bent sounds can sometimes be difficult to difficult to blend into the mix due to the distinct nature or the audio spectrum. Having extensive experience - what kind of console/FX treatment would you suggest for producers, other than follow your ears?

I agree, a lot of circuitbent machines can have frequency responses either well outside of a normal synth or they very grainy and lofi by nature. The biggest bit of advice I can give to people using a lot of bent sounds is to savagely EQ out everything you don’t actually need in the sound. Listen to what part of a sound is actually producing the effect you want and then remove everything else, if you can actually hear it or not. By their nature bent sounds tend not to be very pure and cover a wide frequency range so you might find for example that a drum break might also contain a lot of mid range or bottom end rumble that is serving no real purpose than to clutter up your mix. Removing it will give you a lot more space to work with.

Circuit bending seems to have an artistic stem in Musique Concrete and the avant-garde musical movements. Now it makes it into producers' studios worldwide with a more 'pop' following. Would you dare to foretell the future of experimental music? Or maybe what new trends may soon emerge and shape the entertainment industry?

I would imagine that someone has already kind of missed the point and built a circuit bent VST instrument, and its only a matter of time before Roland release a ‘virtual bent’ instrument but I like to think that all circuit benders are keeping hardware synthesis alive and well to an extent, even if its just creating new sounds for software. It seems that very few manufacturers are producing anything new in the way of synthesis hardware these days so we’re happy to step in a fill the gap by repurposing older kit.
I would imagine that sooner or later the more obvious circuitbent stuff like the sound of a glitching Speak&Spell machine will become a cliché but as long as there are machines that can be bent or modified there will always be new sounds available. I wouldn’t like to suggest what people will be doing with them but there will always be people out there who can take a simple unexpected random noise and build something astonishing from it.

Thank you, Paul!