Urbaines festival offers during 2 weeks a unique convergence of exhibitions, workshops and original music, with a fresh and unique look on today’s urban cultures. This year, MJC Antipode was focusing on Art Toys, Paper Toys, Light Painting, Circuit bending, Hip Hop & Electro. I had the wonderful opportunity to spend 2 weeks there with a friend of mine, Alexandra. Our job ? Showing what circuit bending is about and what you can do with it !!
During the first week, we did some workshops with kids, teaching them how to modify their own toys. The experience was really great, particurlarly with Medhi, a 12 years old man who was really skilled for his age. He brought us an awesome Playskool drum toy and we were quite jealous about this ! You can see a short feature here with an interview (in French) and some excerpts of what his toy sounded like.Every one of them was happy about their work and each one of them managed to have one toy modified.
The second week was serious business. We had to work on a live using circuit bent toys in collaboration with Subtitle, an american MC living in Europe. Unfortunately, Giovanni wasnt able to come (Thank you Mr. Volcano é_é) but it didnt stop us ! We choosed to go Lo-Fi all the way. I was using Gameboys running LSDJ, a Bliptronic 5000 and a circuit bent Yamaha PSS-11 while Alexandra was playing with all the toys she had modified during the last months. This was the best way to have a coherent sound in our opinion. And to be honest, I work faster using Gameboys instead of a computer !! We spent 4 days on this. It was really hard work but we took up the challenge and managed to have a 30 minutes live ready for the show planed on April 24th. I was managing the drums/bass while Alexandra was mostly doing leads. I have to say congratulations Alex, you did an amazing job at taming those damned zombie toys !!
Regarding the stage setup, we deliberatly asked to be on the ground, having a camera filming us from above so everybody could see whats going on. I decided to use a Super Gameboy to show what making music on a Gameboy looked like. But it turned out that most people didnt understand what I was doing. Actually, people were quite astonished to see something completely unrelated to the sound they expected to hear from toys. Exactly our point. To see/hear how it was you’ll have to wait a few days. And expect us to keep on working on this project. The collab with Subtitle is definetly going to happen … And maybe more, who knows ??
