The instinct to make music with jugs, musical saws and washboards is an instinct that takes the abundant, inexpensive artifacts from your life and transforms them into something roughly musical. I don’t think there’s anything else that parallels that tradition more than transforming dollar-bin thrift store toys into magically glitchy musical instruments.
It’s really like a 21st-century junkyard band aesthetic. I think this generation is particularly reluctant to acknowledge the phenomena, possibly because many of the toys that are subject to the transformation — like the Speak & Spell, Casio SK-1, Touch & Tell — still have this aura of childhood futurism. It’s as if admitting that these toys are obsolete is to admit that the promise that they held for us in childhood is no longer relevant today. The reality, however, is that circuit-benders are turning trash into sonic treasure, a concept that I feel is rooted in American folk music.
