Circuit bending is the art of short-circuiting children’s toys or other electronic low-voltage devices for the purpose of generating new sounds, which can then in turn be used in composing music. There is a strong element of randomness and experimentation with this process in that the resulting sounds created by the toys are largely unknown.

Modified Toy Orchestra, lead by sound artist Brian Duffy, creates music in this vein. Their philosophy centers around the idea of, “finding the surplus value in the seemingly redundant.” Toygopop, their debut album, was five years in the making. – It took two years to make the instruments and learn how to play them and an additional three years to compose the songs.

What’s surprising about Toygopop is its accessibility. In my observations, musicians with the mind to experiment to these sorts of lengths usually end up making music that falls under the category of noise. And unless you like to ask yourself questions like, “What is music really?” you’re likely to be put off. But Toygopop, as indicated by its name, is essentially an electronic pop album. An extraordinary electronic pop album.

The combination of playful melodies and the slight familiarity of the distorted sounds used to produce them is an aesthetic which is thoroughly unique and a joy to listen to. I wanted to showcase the song A Grand Occasion, but I couldn’t resist putting this concert video up. It is too cute and funny to pass up on. Here you get to see the toy conductors play their instruments to the backdrop of a short love story involving two stuffed animals.

Artist: Cowboys Fringants
Song: L’Hiver Approche (Winter Approaches)
From album: Break Syndical
Genre: Québécois néo-trad
[Buy CD][Website][Lyrics]

I write this while watching the first snow of the year and remembering by it the long lost friend who recommended to me these very Cowboys Fringants toward the beginning of my music exploration life.

He lived in one of the tiny seaside villages in Quebec that mark the northern end of civilization and paved roads, and suggested the warmth of the “Frisky Cowboys” while speaking of sidewalks lined by ten foot high walls of snow.

It would be easy to imagine the song “L’Hiver Approche” as the beginning to an evening of dancing and drinking in a log-cabin pub, kindling a glow in icy windows that could be seen for winter miles and drawing villagers in from the cold. Don’t you think? Well imagine my surprise when I subjected the lyrics to online translation and discovered a raw social critique of consumerism and proletarian drudgery. Perhaps the song is even more timely than I thought.

I edited together an English translation of the French lyrics from 3 different translator programs with a little grammatical license, and it should give you the basic idea.

Happy Christmas Shopping!

Artist: The Antlers
Song: East River Berlin Wall
From album: Cold War (EP)
[Buy other Album|mp3s][Website][Myspace]

This wisp of a song is to waking up on a cold dark morning what Hermit was to waking up on an all too sunny one. It’s a long and longing corner window stare; drained of momentum by an ice-covered outlook and one’s own frozen breath.

The Antlers is the work of Peter Silberman of Manhattan, and you can download other Antlers songs (including the rest of this EP) here, and read them here.

Artist: School Food Punishment
Song: Close,Down,Back to
From album: School Food is Good Food
[Buy CD][Website]

School Food Punishment, besides being a name that conjures amusing memories, is a Japanese group that makes some pretty catchy pop. Most of the songs from their first full album School Food is Good Food, which was released earlier this year, fit pretty well into my conceptions of the genre. You have your clean female vocals, with a timbre perhaps a little dramatic, over harmless upbeat/dancy, or sentimental backing music framed in a tried and true song structure. Though they may have some rock in their blood, it’s definitely not out in front.

Then somehow this song sneaks into the album, (in the very beginning of it I might add) and alienates all the other songs by bringing with it a soundtrack like a floating electro barge of doom which carries off its amazonian vocal rider in a storm of arcing electricity. It’s urgent and driving, and unexpected.

Maybe it’s the exertion of the first song that tires out the rest of the album for me, but fans of the major pop acts should still find a lot to like in this quirky newcomer. They also have a new album coming out… tomorrow, so we won’t have to wait long to see what direction they are heading.

Artist: Toddle
Song: Colonnade
From album: Dawn Praise the World
[Buy CD| mp3s][Website]

With Dawn Praise the World Toddle has taken a significant step forward as a band. While their first record I Dedicate D Chord was strongly regarded, to me there seemed to be a slightly distracting gap sometimes, between the bare unprocessed vocals of front-woman Tabuchi Hisako and the rest of the band.

Tabuchi herself is a creative dynamo, and with a momentous musical history in the seminal bands Number Girl and Bloodthirsty Butchers in her pocket, she is now plowing her very own path to prominence.

Dawn Praise the World shows us that the last album was no accident, and in between the two releases the flavours have mingled and blended into a riper and more accessible product. The gaps are gone, in their place are layers of softened vocals that embrace the contours of the music without a hint of hesitation and carry it off with determined energy. It feels like she now has a much fuller possession of her musical vision and has taken charge of the effort.

Dawn is a confident and enjoyable album and a milestone in Toddle’s career; and if the past is any measure, the future looks bright for Tabuchi Hisako.

China isn’t exactly well known around the world when it comes to turntablism. In fact they’re not even on the radar, which makes it all the more surprising for a world-class talent like DJ Wordy to emerge out of Beijing. A former guitarist, Wang Liang taught himself how to scratch by watching a pirated VCD of the 2000 DMC championship over and over again. Despite having only enough money to purchase one mixer, one turntable, and one record, DJ Wordy honed his skills over a period of six months to the point where he was able to perform in clubs. The internet played a huge part in his music education, it broaden his musical taste and allowed him to purchase vinyl which was nearly impossible to find in local music stores. His efforts paid off, Wordy claimed the top prize three years in a row at the China DMC Championships (2005-07). He is now regarded as a pioneering musician in China, and an educator to the rest of China about the art of scratch.

The VJs over at HaoBuHao created this extremely slick video of DJ Wordy’s 2007 DMC routine. Wordy is also offering his Pocket Dance Mix CD for free here.

Canadian filmmaker Bruce Mcdonald is doing something unprecedented with his newest film. – He’s letting the public edit it.

Tracey Fragments, which stars Canada’s finest actress Ellen Page, is a borderline avant-garde art film with a highly stylized multi-screen aesthetic. In a recent interview on The Hour, Bruce spoke about how films fall into two categories: those that you should make and those that you shouldn’t. Tracey Fragments is definitely from the latter category. Take a look at the trailer to get a glimpse of the film’s visual insanity.

With so many perspectives and angles on the screen at once, the viewing process become much more involved. As a result of not being able to take in all the perspectives, viewers have to “edit” the film themselves by choosing which screens to watch, and when to watch them. This kind of thing happens on other “normal” films as well, but never to this extent.

But this is not Bruce’s novel idea. His idea is to let the audience literally edit the film. The project is called Tracey Re-fragmented. Through the use of a Creative Commons Licence (brainchild of the brilliant Lawrence Lessig), Bruce has made all the the footage he shot for the film available to the public and is letting them make their own cut. The score for the film, which was written by Broken Social Scene, and the dialogue script, is also available on the official website via Creative Commons. A contest will be held for the best cut. If you don’t have the energy to recut an entire film, you can submit a music video, a trailer, or a short. The winner of the contest will get a prize pack which includes Final Cut Studio 2 and they will have their movie/music video/trailer placed on The Tracey Fragments DVD.

Trent Reznor did a similar thing when he released the Garageband source files for his album With Teeth in 2005 and the subsequent Year Zero. But as far as I know, nobody has dared to try the idea with a feature film.

Bruce’s cut of the film plays in theatres on Nov. 2nd, 2007.

Artist: Dir en Grey
Song: Dozing Green
From album: Dozing Green
[Buy CD][Website]

I saw this video recently and found it appropriate for the Halloween season as apparently did they, choosing late October for the single‘s release.

This is one of the bands one finds everywhere when one first starts investigating Japanese music, along with a host of other familiar names, most of which fall into the genre of Visual Kei (VK), and most of which you will probably never find on this site. Though on principle I hold nothing against VK, it is in general a genre more about fashion and presence and showmanship than creativity in music. In particular the singing style is very recognizable, and sometimes nearly identical between bands.

That said, I can still appreciate an occasional morsel of Dir en Grey on a couple of levels. They have a certain subset of songs that can stand on their own merits for me, with enjoyably intense building and breaking vocal melodies. Their music videos are almost always visually interesting, controversial, and bizarre. And though most of the disturbed shock aesthetic in the genre seems to be rather transparent, Dir en Grey’s widely revered frontman Kyo is indisputably a pioneer in that vein and is apparently far more serious about it than most. An observation that is supported by many accounts (like Ian’s) of their live shows.