How is everyone 'using' their sounds? Those geared towards simple live performance - I guess it's a matter of showing up with your toys and tearing the house down. But what about those trying to incorporate circuit-bent sounds into a more conventional production environment?
I have to confess - as much as I'm totally transfixed by c-bending and determined to start using more digital/glitch textures, it hurts my ears over an extended period! Does anyone use any filtering on sounds to take the top-end off? What place have 'benders' found for their sounds amongst broader composition?
I'm sure plenty would disagree with me, but I don't think that 'taming' circuit bent sounds defeats the point at all. I love the glitchy noisy stuff and I get no small amount of pleasure from finding and producing that kind of sonic debris, but listening to a 45 minute set of straight crackle and pop is a lot to ask.
At both this year's and last year's Bent Festivals, the performances that stuck with me the most were the ones that had some rhythmic structure. EraSer really stood out this year, and Carlos Antenna last year. I'm pretty sure they both have Myspace pages with tracks up that you can check out. Carlos Antenna actually has a rhythm section with real bass and drums and a table of circuit bent stuff in place of a front man. Their whole performance from the 2007 festival in New York is available on Youtube.
For me, the key to playing live with this stuff is to find one or two really stable rhythmic glitches and build from there. Often I'll find a setting on my SK-1 that is a bit more on the musical end of the spectrum and use that as the skeleton for a song, adding both more traditional sounds on the low end and harsher less predictable stuff up on top.
Bent drum samples are also a lot of fun to work with, and pretty easy if you want to try to structure a traditional song around. That being said, it is also a blast just to show up and bust out a wall of noises and textures, there's just a much more limited subset of listeners that are into hearing that sort of thing.
Since bent machines usually produce rich harmonics, it would imo be a shame NOT to use filters and other effects on them! After all, it is a musical instrument and not some sort of holy grail with forbidden measures and taboos.
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