Get Bent
The Tank's annual Bent Festival - similar to December's Blip Festival - invites hackers and composers to reconfigure electronic toys through circuit bending, creating a strange, often exciting form of electronic music. The sounds at last night's closing concert ranged from sheer sonic assault (Loud Objects and Pixel Form), to the ethereal (Lesley Flanigan's Speaker Synth) and enlightened (Tristan Perich's Impulse Manifold.) It's hard to know whether or not this stuff will ever live outside the gamer/hacker fringe, but in a time where "experimental music" often feels polished within an inch of its life, there's something really exciting about the possibilities of this music. (And, yes, it is music. More pics below.)