Glitching the Circuit

We don’t have enough Dada in this world of too much data. Something is needed to break-through the over-curated simulacrum that is the online world in order to let in a bit of non-artificial light. One way to make a break is through the deliberate cultivation of the glitch.

The exact etymology of the word glitch is not known, though it may derive from the Yiddish “glitsh” which means a “slippery place”. In the mid-twentieth century the word first started showing up in technical texts and related to sudden surges of voltage within an electrical circuit causing it to overload. Today a glitch is any kind of malfunction in hardware or error in software.

​In the 1990’s glitch music became a kind of subgenre of electronic music found at the meeting points of the avant-garde, noise, and more popular forms. This type of music, and the methods surrounding it, including circuit-bending, can provide a window, cracked as it is, for looking out at adjacent electronic worlds, including the internet.
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Bending Circuits

Circuit-bending is the art of recycling, reusing and repurposing old consumer electronics, sound making toys, drum machines and synthesizers. The item to be bent needs to be low voltage, because the art involves opening these castaways up, and tinkering on the exposed circuit board while turned on, making connections that weren’t originally part of the design to see what new sounds might be created. If a person bends higher voltage electronics they run the serious risk of electrocution. In addition to de-soldering, and re-soldering pathways that weren’t originally connected, new elements can also be added. These often include sensors, controllers, potentiometers, switches and the like slipped into existing circuit paths. 

Sometimes a metallic surface is added to a spot on the bent instrument that allows a human’s natural electricity to create voltage changes within the instrument, making an electrical loop with the player. They become part of the circuit. 

Circuit-bent instruments emphasize the aleatory, and can be seen as an extension of the fascination with randomness that started gaining prominence in Western music in the 20th century under the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and others who followed in their footsteps. With regrards to Cage, circuit-bending can be seen as an extension of a “prepared” instruments. Like Cage’s prepared pianos, circuit-bent instruments alter devices in ways that make it sound different than before the intervention, although something of their original voice remains present.

The process of circuit-bending was discovered and developed by Cincinnatian Q. Reed Ghazala. Ghazala cultivated a whole suite of instrument types from the detritus of junk he found in thrift shops and other places, and has also written and taught others how to make their own alien instruments. His work, legacy and example are well worth exploring for anyone who wants to lift up the hood on the development and evolution of the practice. 

Bending existing circuits offers the electronic musician and tinkerer a chance to play with chance, creating artful errors that allow the unknown to slip in what was previously predetermined.

  Digital natives need chance like a body needs water. Algorithms have taken the fun out of what was once unplanned and unstructured; internet surfing has been made accident proof, as if it were run by insurance agents and safety specialists. Spots of possible slippage are mopped up in favor of putting forth pre-chewed opinions and junk food clickbait. A similar environment prevails for electronic musicians. The hardware and software being made more often than not makes it difficult to fail. Sound libraries, instrument and effect presets, samplers pre-loaded with perfect pulsing patterns, make it hard to even play in the wrong pitch. 

These fully loaded tools make it a possible to become a producer of music in a matter of minutes. 
Preconfigured musical gear may make it easier to get grooving right off the bat, but the gift of instant gratification steals the sense of accomplishment and intimacy that comes from knowing every inch and crevice of an instrument. And while on first meeting, a run in with a run of the mill modular set up might cause sparks to fly, the slow burn of excitable electrons grows even further from long association. The nuance and subtlety available to those who explore in depth comes across in the very sounds. Circuit-bending is one way to go into those depths, down to the wire. 

Prefab music is low risk music. Something might be made from it that could be used as a backdrop to a car commercial or fit into a DJ set at a dance club, as filler, but without investigating the underlying assumptions of a piece of gear, or software, the things that come out of it will tend to not have the rewards associated with riskier behavior.  Disfigured musical gear gives the gift of decomposition and recomposition to electronic composers. With their materials mangled and mutilated, the gear becomes a mutt, with all the natural advantages over thoroughbred, store bought, off-the-shelf kit.  The system may be less predictable, but that is the point. 

​There are stories that tell of how Richard D. James of Aphex Twin modifies nearly all of his gear, with special regard given to changing the tunings. He gives his gear a personal workover. This accounts for his music’s longevity over the decades since the first songs and albums came out to the public. Kim Cascone has written (after Roland Barthes “The Grain of the Voice”) of a sense of hearing the “grain” inside certain musical works. In his view this grain is in part unconscious material bubbling up as expressed through the imagination, and the grain is what makes music that can touch a listener in their core, beyond mere intellect. Circuit-bending dosen’t necessarily create grain on its own; any technique can sound cold and uninspired when it is used as just another part of checklist for cultural production. What circuit bending can do, is make room for the glitch, slippage, an error where something other than the pre-programmed is liable to mainfest.

Worship the Glitch

In 1994 post-industrial giants Coil made a series of recordings that included the use of the moniker of ElPh. These releases reveled in malfunction, and started their life unplanned. While working on material that would eventually become the Black Light District release, A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room, they were plagued by difficulties with their equipment. Tape machines messed up, digital media was mangled, mechanical issues crept into the workflow. Lucky for us, the recording machines were on when many of these errors happened. 

John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson were both at home with things metaphysical, and to them it felt like some kind of extradimensional entity was manifesting through the glitches. The band called these unintended transmissions from their equipment “ElpH” a being they conceptualized as part equipment, part something reaching out from another realm. Often snatches of random composition came from the gear and other accidents occurred. As they rolled with the obstacles being thrown at them, they realized it was better to accept these errors and mistakes. So they shelved the Black Light District project for the time being to focus on the new energies that were slipping through their defective gear.  It is interesting to note that the word gremlin is sometimes used as a synonym for malfunction.

Drew McDowall, who had played with the band before, but was now a vested member, furthered the notion, “It really felt like we were channeling something. Or at least that’s the idea we allowed ourselves to play with.”

​Balance said of these experiences, “For a week it really felt like something opened up above and poured into us. We were constantly inspired and then, just as abruptly, it finished transmission. We felt it go.”

One album and one EP came out of these sessions. The album was Worship the Glitch by ELpH vs. Coil, and the Born Again Pagans EP was billed as Coil vs. ElpH. Even across a discography as varied as Coil’s there is something very different about these two releases, compared to their other works. They tend towards the sparse and minimalist, the failures given their due and showcased as portals to something beyond.  

 After these Coil records came out in the mid-90’s a new electronic genre started to erupt on the scene. As progenitors of new styles, this wasn’t unusual for Coil. Others had followed their pioneering steps before. They certainly weren’t the only ones in that time frame who had used the errors of technology to shape a new aesthetic, but their album helped give it a name, and a style or subgenre called glitch began to emerge. Glitch had its home on the outskirts of more popular electronica, with underpinning strategies borrowed from the techniques and obsessions of 20th century art music masters.

Glitch exploed for a time. What had once been heard in the most outré and underground of cultural settings was now being mixed on dance floors, in chill rooms and played as a background for late night trips all across a conceptual black light district. 

​One signature technique of glitch music from the time was using scratched or beat up CDs to make them purposefully skip or stutter. Circuit-bending was another. Accessible computer software for making music was also reaching more artists at the time and digital artifacts from heavily altered sound files came to be incorporated into the style. A standard practice was to sample these artifacts in short cuts, which became the basis for building up beats, rhythms and textures. This latter template became the defacto sound of “glitch” as a genre. The Clicks and Cuts compilation released on the Mille Plateaux label in 2000 remains a high point watermark of the genre, with contributions from many of the leading artists involved during its hey-day.  

Yet after it had evolved it became easily copy-able, just as many other musical styles that preceded it had been, and just as easy to be co-opted by market forces and musicians who wanted to try to cash on this next big thing.

Kim Cascone pointed this out in his inspired essay The Aesthetics of Failure that glitch as just the latest way of investigating the creative misuse of technology. Yet as the internet grew, the process by which those techniques spread happened much faster than in previous decades. In sharing technique of glitch, some of the imaginative grain within the music was lost as it became just another commodity. With the widespread availability of digital music software, “the medium is no longer the message in glitch music: the tool has become the message.”

​Failure had reached a point of failure. 

Logic Circuits and Automatism

If our own thinking can be glitched than perhaps it is still possible to create systems that embrace the slippage. If we don’t want the “tool to become the message” than a third element beyond the digital must be added into the mix. 

The technopoly runs on data. Is there a way to make it more Dada? The artists of the Dada movement rejected many things, but logic and reason were chief among them. Where was the logic in the atrocities of World War I?  The founders of the movement had lived through the war and in reaction against it, sought to elevate nonsense and the irrational above cruel, cold logic.

In our own time reason and logic have failed to deliver the utopia of technology as promised and promoted by Big Techs advertisers and PR specialists. It can seem that humanities dystopian nightmares are what are actually manifesting. Perhaps part of technologies failure is due to the fact that the digital world is built on binaries. 

Logic circuits or gates are the brick and mortar of digital systems. They are electronic circuits that have one or more than one input, but only one output. Logic gates are the switches that turn ON or OFF depending on what the user does. A logic gates turn ON when a certain condition is true, and OFF when the condition is false. A logic gate is able to check whether or not the information they get follows a certain rule, and the output is thus determined. . 

There are several types of logic gates, but the three most common are the NOT gate, the AND gate, and the OR gate. The NOT gate is the simplest. It’s sole function is to take an input that is either ON or OFF and give it back as the opposite, what the original signal is NOT. 

The AND circuit requires two inputs. It can only turn on when both inputs are ON. If only one input is on it turns OFF, and when both inputs are off, it turns OFF. 

The OR circuit also requires two inputs. It needs one input to be on for it be ON, and is also still ON when both inputs are ON, and it is only OFF when both inputs are OFF.

While variations from these basic circuits have been used to build complex systems, they still have at their core, the binary which undergirds the entire techonosphere. It is rather difficult for the unknown to break through when only two outcomes are possible.  A third position between ON and OFF is never arrived at. This would require ternary logic, and as far as I know, a ternary computer has yet to be built.

In lieu of a ternary computer, a third element needs to be added to digital systems: that is the human component. This is also where I think modes of artistic creation in the spirit of Dada can help. By moving away from pure logic and reason, by letting a bit of nonsense or irrationality slip through, the human tendency to also think in binaries can be glitched. 

​So much of the creative process is automated when working with digital tools, but it has little in common with the methods of automatism that came out of the Surrealist milieu. The various methods of automatism developed by the Surrealists put a person in touch with the unknown, whether it be the unconscious or from beyond the fragile borders of this world. Bringing these techniques back into play could give back a sense of humanity to the sounds of dead electric emitted from programmed machines. 

Automatism came in part from the method of automatic writing or spirit writing, when mediums and others of their psychic ilk were said to be in touch with disembodied spirits. The writing came through them from the other side. For the Surrealists tapping into these forces became a source of creativity. The results were often startling as they bypassed logic and reason.

To the point of this essay, in artistic creation, logic is rarely the principle that needs to be abided. Automation needs to be bypassed in favor of automatism. In electronic music strategies and interventions need to be used to work around and supplant the built-in binary biases of the tools, otherwise the music being made on them ends up just sounding like a commercial for the tool.

Circuit-bending is one way to bring a sense of automatism back into the studio. Musical dice games, musikalisches würfelspiel, are another. These go back to the eighteenth century, and exist in a variety of forms.  Today there exists a set of Musicians Dice, that look like they were stolen off a D&D table. They are handsome 12-sided dice that have the chromatic scale engraved on them in silver. They allow composers to easily work at writing 12-tone music and as a basis for improvising in jam sessions. While a computer is capable of generating random numbers in various sets, using something outside of the digital workstation for composition creates a new zone for creative insights to occur.

Guitarist Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance developed what he calls the Hexadic system, using common playing cards. Chasny developed and used his system to break a creative funk he had felt he was in. The cards are related to the notes on a guitar and through playing games with the cards, players can arrive at new tonal territories they might not have come up with on their own. Chasny has put out three albums worth of Hexadic material, and other musicians are also using the system. 

 The painter Max Ernst used the technique of decalcomania, where a texture or pattern is transferred from one surface to another. Ink, paint or other medium is applied to the final surface, and while still wet, other materials such as glass, leaves, patches of cloth, aluminum foil or pottery are pressed or rubbed against it. Musical decalcomania can be achieved by incorporating found sounds into the texture of a piece. These could be samples, field recordings, or the use of unconventional acoustic material. 
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Whatever the source may be, if we are to glitch the circuit, we need to open ourselves up to the slippage that comes in from the unknown. Otherwise people might as well just let AIs design the music for them. And while generative music systems can be built that produce startling beauty, such as Wotja and Brian Eno’s Bloom, they leave too little for unintended influences from outside the confines of the system. For that a human really does have to put themselves into line with the flow of the circuit path. To create something new, we need to become conduits, connect and plug into to an outside source.