Maandag Avond Soldeer Klub’s
MASK MAGAZINE
#2 - September 2018
IN THIS ISSUE we talk to: - GIJS GIESKES - PETER EDWARDS - CASPER ELECTRONICS - BASTL INSTRUMENTS
Interviews, transcription, editing, layout, design and some photographs by DHJ Bosten. Additional photographs were downloaded from the internet. (C) Tear Apart Tapes 2018 Tear Apart Tapes is a label producing cassettes, records, eurorack modules and printed matter based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Distributed by Clone Records. Many thanks to all involved. info@dasding.nl
Gijs Gieskes: 'Maybe I should plug it in' http://gieskes.nl/
Gijs Gieskes' creations bridge the divide between innovative modules in euro-rack format and stand-alone art-gallery installations. Fuelled by barely tamed electricity and informed by a high-tech junk yard esthetic, in interaction, they seem to possess a life of their own, like a new breed of insect androids. Some of them are electro-mechanicalacoustic and some are purely electronic. Watching them in action, they exude the kind of clumsy
and lonely autonomous machine helplessness you get from a Survival Research Laboratories video (if less violent) or something like the 'Lauf der Dinge' movie by Peter Fischli en David Weiss. They break down common household items or toys and interface them with the rest of your eurorack modules: a toy speech-recorder; a clock (no, a real alarm-clock); hard-disk motors; an hour-glass interacting with a laser-beam.
His VU-Perc(ussion) module is a good example that packs his esthetic into a compact product: the needle of an old-fashioned VU-meter is triggered by external gates to jam into a copper strip welded on to a piezo-microphone element and amplified. Each one assembled by hand, they are all different, and plugged in and amped, they will make the acoustics of your entire eurorack case come alive with a resounding thunk! Suffice is to say he has an instantly recognizable esthetic that is all his own.
A silly way to introduce Gijs Gieskes would be to say that he still lives with his parents in their house in Geldrop, Brabant. A more accurate way would be to tentatively state that he still allows them to stay there while the house steadily fills up with his creations. He has a workspace upstairs and one downstairs; the dining room table is covered with 'Nodrum' modules he had been assembling with a friend the day before. There are large drawer cabinets, the kind used to store large A0 prints or maps, filled with boxes of parts, neatly laid out. His parents sit in the front of the house, his mother knitting, his father reading a newspaper, a woodstove purring away between them in the autumn evening. They are clearly very nurturing and supportive of their son's creativity, even as its products threatens to swamp the very cozy 1930's house. He studied at Eindhoven Design Academy, something called Concept design. He made a 'record-cutter' back then, which records grooves into old flipped-over CD's.
Made some records to use in live-settings. He did some shows, less these days. But he likes to use one device for one show. 'It all started in 98 or so; I made music with existing gear; an 808 and a Juno 60. My father who was in a band, my uncle had these machines, they were in the backyard
where they built a house to practice in and I could just use them. But I wanted more. I wanted a sampler but I had no money so I started making one myself out of a voice recorder from a toy store. I didn't know anything about technical stuff in those days but I rigged up a little speaker through an amplifier which activated the button on the recorder. I didn't even know how a transistor
worked back then. But that's when you start to find out. The trigger would activate the speaker which pushed the button on the recorder! And then you have a sampler. It should be around somewhere still upstairs. Most of these early DIY things I still have. I also did VJ stuff so I made some machines for that. I had a log with an amplifier inside, you could attach a camera to it and on the end it had a speaker with a mirror on it, so if you point a screen at it you get a feedback loop which visualizes the audio.' 'From there, the move to building stuff in small batches and selling them was actually not that long ago. At first I wanted to do it all with subsidies and arts council grants, which seemed a viable way of funding an artist career. Doing one-offs and applying for funding for each project. Friends of my parents are artists and they worked like that, so I thought that was something I could do too. And it worked in the beginning, every request was granted, like starter stipends and basic maintenance funding. But then came the financial crisis and the liberals cut funding to a lot of these institutions. So then I thought well, this is not going to go well like this, with all these changes. I thought I'd better start making stuff to sell as well, so as to not be dependent on these people in committees who decide who gets funded. They sit there and look at your proposals... I had seen a list of people who were in one of these the committees, and I looked at what they did, and there was like one who made jewelry, and another one was a painter, and it all had little to do with what I was
doing. Not that that is strictly necessary, but I didn't want to be dependent on their whims. Anyhow these funds have a lot less to allocate now. But I haven't applied anymore since at least 2005.
Bart Smit Goes Eurorack The first euro-rack module I started building was the voice recorder, I think. With this toy they've selling for years at the Bart Smit toy store. People were always asking me when I would start doing euro-rack so I thought well okay let's do it. I was in this band with a guy who was using euro-rack and he kept asking for it. So I started making them but he actually never bought one! Then I started making more different modules, usually in batches of 30 or so. These days it's usually around a 100, but some modules I just produce 10 at a time, depending, like the one with the clock. Then I sell them and take it from there. There are actually two different versions of the Clock module; one just runs and the mechanical sound is amplified and it gives random outputs and has a clock divider. It's not much use really. But it's nice for random trigger-
ing. The other one is more useful because it has a clock input and then you can advance it every time it receives a trigger. Actually it needs a VCA because the amplification is crazy, like 200 percent so feedback is a problem very quickly. 'The 'best-seller' so far is probably the Nodrums. Or the VU-Perc now, probably, or it should be, anyhow I made a waiting list for it now, and I made some other things in between. I made the Relay-Perc on more or less the same principle but it is a lot easier to make. So I will make more of those, I ordered some 70 relays now. First I wanted to make it with a reed-switch, they switch and when it releases- it works with a magnet so it has a nice release oscillation to it, a tone. But it's very soft, hard to amplify.
‘sometimes it’s not really about the product but about the idea’ 'Where do these crazy ideas come from? Well, one thing leads to another, and one sees a lot of stuff on the internet. Things to try out. Combining things, it comes naturally. Some ideas lead to others, or even backwards to underlying ideas, so sometimes it's not really about the product
but about the idea. Then making it practical leads to different ideas, and sometimes the actual product is less than promised by the idea. But now I try to make things more accessible as well, more user-friendly. There were things like the DEP2 and the HSS synth which were different in approach and in operation. Before that I did all mechanical stuff, when I started out. I made this sequencer with a wheel for instance, it was derived from the 808 in a way, with switches and then you could insert mini-jacks and these would activate little motors etcetera, the one with the brush contacts (like a Wurlitzer rhythm box) So now I got back to those sort of. 'But then, yeah, you end up making packages all day and going back and forth to the post office. But lately it varies a lot. I try to sell more to shops these days. I have less visitors to my website I think, maybe because I'm on Facebook now as well. (his
website is pleasantly old-school and messy, but it is a good place to have everything collected) But then you get Instagram as well, and then you don't try that hard to make good videos anymore, I guess. His creations, as stated, are somewhere in between gallery-stuff and 'useful' musical appliances. Gallery shows are a little disappointing, he says, too static perhaps, too clinical, since the devices are meant to be used, there is a prohibitive distance between the 'art' hanging on the wall and the visitor in these settings. People are hesitant to use the machines, and then they don't know how they work, etcetera, it can be frustrating. So then you have to make a device that runs on its own, like, no interaction needed. We proceed to one of his workshops where he has parts and older creations stored, blank panels, electronic parts. A pick-and-place machine, a robot that places electronic parts on a PCB, which he proceeds to demonstrate for us. Paper strips full of parts are fed from a reel, the PCB is fitted with adhesive tape to test placing, which the machine gets from a file you feed it. The robot races between the two with much whirring and clanking. Amazing to see. Then it goes into an
oven to fix the solder paste. Upstairs he has an attic workspace filled with projects and instruments, where he usually does all his soldering. There's also a laser-cutter up there for making panels and enclosures. Of special note are his video-synthesizer modules. The flagship is the 3TRINSRGB+1 analogue audio video synthesizer, which is pretty complex.
From the manual: '3TrinsRGB+1c is a analog audio video synthesizer, with the HEF40106 IC as oscillator source. The reason for using this IC is that it is used a lot by people just starting to make electronics. When I started to make oscillators I was using it often, and am still using this IC quite a lot, because it can do a lot with just a small
amount of components.. In this case the amount of components used seems to have risen quite a lot because of all the features that are included in the device' It produces some amazing images (see screenshots) and it has a video-input for mixing live (or recorded) video into the effects. Then there's the Ocillatoscope, in two versions. It is an audio oscillator with a video output and various modulation inputs. It converts CV and audio signals into video and audio. The old version has a composite video output and the new one has a VGA output, which produces sharper images. His 1-bit B&W video-sampler is also fun to play with, producing instant primitive Atari-like super-low resolution pixilated images.
Ocillatoscope 2b
Peter Edwards - Casper Electronics
The first time I saw Peter Edwards perform he invited the audience over to gather around his setup in the middle of the room, the only light coming from it. It was an intense and intimate experience, hypnotic and involving. It’s perhaps indicative of the way he works to break barriers and generate engagement and participation, of a frustration with the ‘normal’ one-way street trajectory of the art-world, where true feedback is rare. PE: ‘I come from a fine arts background, and it was really just about inventing things. I did a lot of Dungeons & Dragons when I was a kid and I would make maps, treasure maps, and build forts. And then I wanted to make things that work. So, you make a fort, and you have to pretend that it’s working, and like a stick is a telephone. Then I wanted to make these
objects real, so I started working with electronics, and inventing sort of fantasy objects, and that led into circuit-bending. And that’s where it kind of exploded. It’s a very sculptural practice in its process and in how you experience it, it’s about your expectations of an object versus what it does, you know, it’s about discovery, it’s not just this tool for making music. So that was really the big push for me. I was making music but it wasn’t my career, I was doing visual arts. But I really enjoyed computer music, and I got an MS20 and I got into that stuff. But then I realized that people would buy this stuff, and that was it. I built like 3 Speak&Spells, I sold them, I paid my rent for two months, and then I was like, well, let’s just keep doing this. So I bought like a 100 Speak&Spells on eBay, and did that for three years. (So it was him that bought up all those TI machines?) Yeah, I was really big on it for a while, and then I set up this website, and it was one of the only websites that showed you how to actually do anything, in like the early days of the web. So that really pushed me to keep going as well, because, you know, there are people emailing me saying ‘I like this’, or ‘can you show me that?’, it was just a dialogue, and that’s also what’s appealing for people
now, with the euro-rack stuff, I think. But in any case, that’s what sort of gets you going, there’s this personal story of ‘oh, I used to take things apart’, or ‘I really like making music’, but there’s also the social part, there’s all this energy and you get intoxicated, it’s intoxicating, all of that. When you feel you’re doing something real that’s engaging with the world. That’s been like one of my criticisms of the art world is that you can make something and put it out and it’s like watching a balloon float away into the sky, it just gets smaller and disappears, until you don’t see it anymore. You can make some painting or a sculpture and it might not interact with anybody. And sometimes it does, but like, the people who are looking at a lot of that fine art stuff, it’s just not an audience that I can relate to. So the hobbyist field, it really is exiting, more lively. There’s a lot of truth, there’s a lot of sincerity, a lot of passion. So it just made sense.
PE: I feel like that might be generational; like when we were in school people were still high on the 80ies, this conceptual art thing, so you had to be able to talk about the meaning more than just ‘liking’ it. ‘liking’ it is not enough, having it look cool is not enough, having it look good is not enough. I don’t know, I think they overshot it, yes; concept is important; we’re brilliant creatures and we should express that, but pure visceral enjoyment is valuable and that is what music gives you. In the music field there’s all of that heady shit, there’s whatever historical relevance and all that, but then it just needs to feel good. I studied at a conservatory, like electro-acoustics and composition and stuff, and saw people on this pursuit of really fine music, and even that- I wasn’t into it as much but I was watching other people and even in that pursuit, in that very lofty academic world there still had to be that level of ‘it’s good if it sounds good’. A gut feeling.
(I went to art school, too, I tell him, but I dropped out, because it was altogether a disappointing experience, it seemed more about networking, most of the teachers were artists who couldn’t quite make it, and it didn’t seem to matter what you made, as long as you could then talk about it for four hours... )
‘Yes; concept is important; but pure visceral enjoyment is valuable and that is what music gives you.’
PE: But ironically, I found that a lot of people are super uncomfortable talking about their work, at school. And that was almost more my complaint, not that you had to talk about it a long time, it was that nobody could say anything, and it was this bizarre mix of confusion and shyness, I don’t know what it was. (It seems like they are embarrassed by the simple joy of making stuff and then have to find an intellectual justification beyond that...)
I did the Speak & Spell exclusively for maybe 5 years. It just paid, and then I branched out into more circuit bending and I did all of that for like 5 years. But then, if you watched the circuit bending scene over the last decade, it’s like all of the benders have grown up and have gotten into analog electronics. It allows you to do a lot of that same- use the same approach, the experimental ‘let’s see what happens’ kind of approach, but you have so much control and you can reproduce it. Like the big thing for me is that I can actually make 200 of something. I tried to do a production run of S&S’s and we made 40 or so and it was tons of work, some of them didn’t work, some
buttons didn’t work. They’re 40 years old, so shit wears out, and it didn’t make any sense anymore. It’s a nice idea, circuit bending is a really beautiful art form in certain ways, not in others, but if you want to have a dialogue with a larger community you just can’t do it that way, as a product maker. I’m really interested in being a ‘product-maker’, that’s a part of my medium that I really think is important. More so than doing site-specific installations which I also enjoy, but making products is really- super trippy experimental- because people have these expectations, because there are so many product developers out there, in the world, you know, we’re all capitalist consumers, so there are so many products out there, and people have all these expectations of what a product is, and you can subvert those, you can mess with it. Play with people’s expectations a little bit.
‘There are so many products out there, and people have all these expectations of what a product is, and you can subvert those.’ PE: So all the stuff I make is pretty unconventional; I’m always shocked that people buy it at all, because it’s weird stuff, but, I’m also not shocked because I genuinely enjoy this stuff, so I’d imagine that other people would too. So even though it’s like- Korg is never going to steal my ideas, I’m never worried about patenting anything, because who’s going to make it- Behringer? You know, who’s going to copy this idea? It’s just too weird. You know, I’m not making a TB303 emulator or something. I mean, I love that stuff too, but I’m just going to let other people do that. But yeah, so the first thing was real solid circuit bending,
and that was just making sculptural objects, and what I liked about that was, I could just spend as much time making the graphics on the container, or the case, as I would on making the circuitry. That’s fun, the object is a real thing. Now it’s real straight up analog electronic with a circuit-bender approach. You know, the BitRanger, which is my latest product, is very much circuit-bender inspired. It just happens to be all discrete components, well there are IC’s, it’s all CMOS but you do your own patches and it’s weird stuff. And the one I’m working on now has a similar approach. It has 36 inputs and outputs, and you know, that’s a lot of I/O’s and when you patch ‘m they do weird stuff. There’s a breadboard attachment and you can experiment with how things connect. A continuation of the Novadrone, which was the first real product, that was a lot of the same thing, like unexpected (things), you just plugged a capacitor between points and it just starts making music. And what’s really fun is, you start to develop your skills as an engineer, you can go beyond the circuit-benders- hopefully it will show me something cool, and you start to engineer some really cool potential in there too, so like, with this stuff, I’m not like a ‘good’ engineer, but I have some experience and I know how to buffer things, and
make things communicate, so there’s all this potential for like the outside world to engage with this stuff too, in potentially unexpected ways. And that’s super-exciting, I mean as soon as you get even close to the periphery of this whole euro-rack world, it’s all about this interconnectivity, you know, it’s not always about ‘this is a sequencer, it sequences my bass line generator’, I mean, it can be a lot more unusual than that, a lot more experimental. What’s a generator, what’s a processor, what’s a signal? What’s audio, what’s subaudio? (The lines can blur) So there’s a lot of (parallels) between sometimes subtle, sometimes really obvious connections between things, and that’s the stuff that’s cool. I mean, it’s the connections between the modules that makes euro-rack so good, it’s not discrete single functions that are that cool. I mean, you could point at individual ones and say ‘yes, that is a really cool function’, but generally like, the sum total of euro-rack as a medium, I find that the exciting aspect is the connections. (Yeah, the fluidity too, of course) That fluidity takes you to all of these different discoveries. Unexpected results, surprising discoveries, often very fun surprises. And that’s like- you know, as an inventor, to make like things for
musicians, because you can take this approach where you’re just an engineer but you’re making stuff for musicians, I kind of want to make things for engineer-musicians, because I’m an engineer-musician, so I want to have as much fun as anybody else will. So I’m not like designing- I don’t know, sometimes like, a lot of engineers don’t play music that much, it can be sort of mutually exclusive, because your music starts to suffer if you’re engineering too much, and your engineering starts to suffer if you’re making music too much. It’s a delicate balance for sure. But I think you have to be really true to what you want to experience and not just get seduced by the interest of the market, and say ‘well, people want sequencers’, or ‘well, people want to make EDM,’ or something. You have to be true to what you really want. I want to explore. I want to discover things. Constantly, through the life of an instrument, to be always exciting. So, I’m making that stuff. And I think there is a market out there, I’m not looking to sell 10 million of anything.’
‘If I can sell 300 of something, then I can sell the weirdest crap in the world. Then I can sell 200 of them. That’s all it has to be.’ ‘4 years ago I moved to Holland to do the ‘Instruments and Interfaces’ program, which is part of Sonology*, which is an electro-acoustics- I don’t even know how you explain that, it’s just a weird new kind of new music, electronic music program. And at STEIM** so it was like a hybrid between the two programs. It was just about making instruments. You know, it was grad school, I loved it, I hated it, there were ups and downs, it was life-changing as well as really boring, you know. It was a big mix and I learned a lot and it was cool, but mostly it was
just like meeting tons of people studying music, like, as their real life-investment was really exciting, and especially people that were studying unconventional music, and dedicating all of this time and energy to just making weird shit that like, wasn’t always fun to listen to- you know on the one hand I was talking about it has to have like a gut-appeal, but there’s like other pursuits, like sometimes it doesn’t sound good, but there’s still some human spirit in there that’s exiting and it’s just fun to meet these people. So I was there for 2 years, then I taught at the art school KBK, teaching electronics for artists so it was like more high-concept, like how do we perceive electricity and use it as a force in the same way that we communicate with paint or wood or something, and then getting down to specifics of, what are the actual physical principles behind the medium that we’re using? But it’s like every art school, there are tons of people working with electronics, but there are no electronics classes, it’s a weird thing right now. It’s super-intimidating, it’s not intuitive, it doesn’t apply to a lot of things that we understand intuitively, it’s just its own complex‘I mean on the one hand it also is super-universal,
because it’s just the movement of electrons that exist everywhere and in everything and that’s like, our very matter so we get it like on some subconscious level,’
‘but on a conscious level- they try to make water-analogies and comparisons so these analogies break down. And people just- you know you can’t learn everything about everything, so a lot of people let other companies decide how electronics should work. And I feel so fortunate- I want to use the word
‘blessed’ but I’m not religious- I feel so blessed that I somehow allowed myself to spend 8 years just stubbornly trying to learn how this works. Because now I kind of know how it works and I don’t just need to let Doepfer- or you know Sony or Korg or even all the way down to these boutique brands, I don’t need to let them tell me how things work. I can decide, you know, nobody told me that these instruments I’m making should exist; I decided that they should exist. And I learned how to make them happen. And that’s what’s exciting with seeing people like Gijs (Gieskes) and Bastl, especially, these are guys who have learned how the medium works and they are saying; ‘this is how I think it should work.’ With Gijs being one of the foremost examples of someone taking this to the extreme, he’s not just pushing aside conventional methods, he’s also doing it with skill, in creating these really worthwhile statements, that are worth listening to. Truly original, and- I don’t like everything he does, I mean nobody likes everything that anybody does, of course- but he just keeps going. I think the majority of it is incredibly important, he’s one of my favorite artists, that I have ever known, he’s fantastic. And Bastl is one of the other groups that I’ve really admired for a long time so I’m thrilled to be working with them now. So after being in Holland for three years I met up with these guys, we met a couple of years ago, and we said, ‘oh we should collaborate some day,’ and then I came to visit, and we were like, ‘let’s do this.’ OK, let’s do it. And then I just moved here (Brno) It’s a really bizarre like, life-change to meet up with these dudes and then just move my whole life here, but it was like one of those things where I feel like, you know, once in a lifetime, you just see something there and you’re like, ‘I have to do this.’ It doesn’t really make sense. I’ve never, ever considered moving to the Czech Republic. It’s just never been on
my radar. It’s far away from my family. It’s inconvenient, you know, I don’t speak Czech, I don’t have insurance. Moving to a new country sucks, there’s just no way around it. I mean, maybe some crazy person likes this kind of thing, but it’s hard. On a practical level. On other levels, you know, people here are great, the city is great, it’s easy, it could be a lot harder. But I think like, I don’t know, it’s just something I want to put into words because I think it’s really important. There’s something happening right now, and if you’ve got the energy and the interest it’s worth getting involved in, you know. There’s a lot of brilliant people making weird stuff and I don’t think that happens all the time and I don’t know if it’s going to keep happening. It’s just that the conditions are right for this really momentous scene. You have to get it while it’s hot, and then get out. Maybe after 10 years I’ll be done, and that’s that, or 3, or never, I don’t know. But right now it’s like, this is good. (I tell him some of the stuff we talked about in my earlier interview with Ondrej and Vaclav, about community-building and the fact they didn’t know how many modules they sell in a month, etc.) PE: Well, that’s part of what makes Bastl worth being a part of,
they’re just so productive. There’s this heavy portion of sort of that fantasy-bro-talk of ‘yeah, someday we’ll buy an old school and we’ll have a skatepark, and we’re gonna make the biggest synthesizers in the world!’ There’s all this fantasy talk, but then there’s tons of real shit getting done. You know, you go down to the production room and it’s just getting done. Vaclav is a crazy powerhouse machine, his whole life is very much like Rob Hordijk in that both of them are these guys, as I see them, their whole life is fine-tuned, it is like shaved down to just be productive in this, and you’re doing it, and you’re going all the way. Those are two engineers that I admire, they’re at the top of my list of people whose work I admire, and their approach. And you know, Gijs (Gieskes) is totally the same, of course. Yeah, they’re just super-productive. I’ve learned a ton from their approach. Because I’ve always been really careful, you know, like you have to really meditate on something for a year before it evolves. That’s Rob’s approach, it’s more meditative, I don’t know if I should be talking about people in this interview as such because I don’t want to put words in their mouths. Let’s just talk about Vaclav. But it’s nice to see people’s models of how it should be and be inspired by them, that’s the main thing. It’s just the right time and place to be doing what I’m doing, here and now. I’m able to get back even deeper in to the conceptual side, because they are taking care of a lot of logistical stuff. And I can say, why do I really want to do this, who do I
really want to work with, what am I actually really enjoying? You know when you get like really beaten down by money you just- everything goes out the window. When you’re living in New York or something, you have to compromise your morals, your ideals, your dreams, you know, because you have to live, and here, living is easy, and I can just focus on my dreams. The stuff I’m making is- there’s no promises, it’s not like selling a cell-phone cover or something, where you have this guaranteed market. On one hand I said, yes, you can sell 200 of anything, but still, you don’t really know. But you just have to go with it and believe people will appreciate honesty and investment. The Bitranger’s been out for three months. The cartridge thing is cool, there’s a lot of potential. But you know, as soon as my babies are born, I get bored with them. So I’m like not at all interested in supporting this product. New things are more exciting than old things. So that’s part of the next level for me, how to develop a bit more of a team, that then is able to collectively focus on support and development, and that’s what Bastl offers in general. Specifically that’s what I’m going to be focusing on more. But it’s about letting you do what you do. I’m a good designer, but I’m a horrible documenter, really bad at letting little decisions happen. There should be videos for this, there should be manuals for this,
and then there’s this breadboard attachment and that opens up a whole world of other modules you can build to interface with this, and eventually, if you do it right, the community starts developing their own, I mean, that’s like Arduino, the strength of Arduino is community, because the hardware is nothing special, everyone knows it, it’s not a special device, it’s open. But it’s brilliantly designed to allow this community to grow around it, and that community makes it amazing, one of the most important art/tech developments of the last several decades. Historically it’s incredibly important, despite the fact that it’s just a micro-controller. So I’m really inspired by that and I want to get some of that mojo, but there’s a lot of moving parts there.’ ‘But the dream for all of us is just to be able to get
as deep in the rabbit-hole as we want, and make things that are as weird as we want, and not have the world tell us we’re wrong!’
‘But at the same time you need to engage with people, so that’s like a funny balance. That’s the euro-rack scene, or the new electronic music scene, the hardware scene. People are open for anything, open to sharing their feedback and encouragement, you don’t feel like you’re just doing it alone. But you don’t feel like you need to pander to the masses. I think that’s what I’m trying to figure out, there’s that balance in there that’s interesting. ‘Instrument building is a super cool craft, there’s definitely no shortage of- I guess most mediums are like this, but you can do graphic design, you can do music, you can do photography, you can do electrical engineering, you can go play shows,
you can go to events, for the kind of person who always wants to be engaged, I think this is a really great medium to be involved in. And a lot of people think it’s magic, that’s pretty cool too. That’s kind of fun to take advantage of. You know, you’re doing something that touches them emotionally, like music is a pretty powerful medium. You’re not getting your 401K or your big holiday bonuses from this stuff, but the experiences make up for that.
Now there are so many people involved, there’s no single voice anymore. And the medium itself is kind of over. I think the spirit lives on, which is great.
The name Casper Electronics refers to Casper the Friendly Ghost, the friendly ghost in the machine, because in circuit-bending it’s always about finding that spirit that’s in there. What made circuitbending especially cool, or what made it actually work and important is that there’s malfunctions everywhere, but because of this little key period in the evolution of electronics malfunctions were really crazy and fun and cool. So like, it would malfunction but it wouldn’t just turn off of blow up, it would start saying random words. Reed Ghazala was in a sense the godfather of circuit-bending, but I had real issues with him when I was getting started, because I was young and proud, and he was like the voice of the medium, and his work is great, but I just did not align with his beliefs at all. What I was doing was just not him, but he was being promoted as the spokesperson for the medium, and that was tough. But you know, things evolved in their own way.
Casper Electronics and Falafular on the Bastl rooftop in Brno
BASTL; building a modular community From their website (http://www.bastl-instruments.com/) : ‘Bastl instruments (est.2013) is a community driven company with main focus in development and production of electronic musical instruments which range from pocket sized sound boxes or utilities to fully featured modular synthesizer systems. Several other community projects take place such as organizing music related events, coffee roasting facility, music labels, educational videos, workshops or even clothing production. Everything is produced in Brno, Czech republic and most of the components are produced in the house or sourced from local companies and distributors. Since 2016 we collaborate with Peter Edwards of Casper electronics.Closely related bussinesses are synthesizer stores noise.kitchen and detective squad.We are diverse group of people, but we all share passion for music! We run music labels NONA Records and Bükko Tapes. We make 2 different monthly events in our neighbourhoods Bastl Jam and Rise Above.’ Origins: Václav Peloušek: I Met Ondrej at art school, and at that time we’d both been doing some electronic music, and eventually we figured out that we’re both building some electronic circuits, and we figured out that we are all building the same stuff, so, after talking to a few more guys, because there were very few things online that you could build, this was 20092010, maybe. That’s how we met. Ondřej Merta: That’s how we met, yeah. We did another project, but it was more political, and so we started to collaborate on different platforms, first we shared the interest in the elec-
they were like, ‘yeah, cool! Put the documentation there’ and he shared it with other people. So this was pretty big here, and Vaclav’s father was one of these inventors, he was, or he still is, working in the national TV, and back in the day there was no technology, you know, there were no dollars and deutschmarks here, to buy all the stuff, all the equipment needed, so they were really masters in developing stuff, also on a higher level, and my father, he was doing some electronics as a hobby but also as a kind of job, so he was able to fix the neighbors’ video or radio, things like that. When I was a kid I was more into the books, reading books and I was more into philosophy and stuff like that, and I was always like, hey, like electronics and stuff, I was, I felt so different than my father, and now, after all, I’m asking his advice and about electronics and going pretty much this way! So this was really surprising for me. tronic stuff, but as musicians, not as engineers or whatever, and then later we found that we also somehow have the same background, because our fathers were from a generation we call ‘Bastl’ and that’s also why later, after we discontinued the Standuino project, we chose this name, to represent our roots, our background. ‘Bastl’ is a local slang word coming from the verb ‘basteln’ in German, but in Chech it came to mean DIY electronics, and it was really popular here. From the 50ies to the late 80ies there was a huge number of dudes building and inventing some crazy stuff. Of course it was not all dedicated to musical instruments, but there were some efforts to do something, there was, instead of using some open source stuff. There was a magazine, and they were sharing the circuits, and everything. There was one dude for instance living like 30 kilometers from here, he was trying and he developed some kind of organ, with a filter. Then he wrote to the magazine and
So this is the background. A background as musicians, we have no education in electronics, like engineering school or whatever, we are from this art field, so we improvise with what is around and we are trying... How we started, we were really trying to fulfill the needs we had, as musicians, for ourselves. In the beginning, but also, we started to talk about this stuff, and then Vaclav went to the UK and he went really deep in to the Arduino thing, and he developed a crazy video synthesizer there, and we were communicating from time to time but from a distance, so he was there and I was here, and Nicholas Collins* came to town, he did some workshop there, and I was, sure, I want to see it, and I want to do stuff with that, and it was so fucking simple, so I was like, I was really amazed, like how you can find interesting things in a really elementary, simple thing. And there were so many people so interested in what we were doing, so I was like, yeah come on, this dude (Collins), he left, but I can do this stuff too, right?
So I did the first workshop, building some stuff, things I was building before, like the Atari Punk Console, and some few things with some people, and then I realized that Vaclav is really on a higher level, so he came back and I was like, hey, let’s do something! And I had this experience with simple workshops, and we had this idea that people are interested in that stuff, and even when you are not educated in that stuff, even when you don’t know everything about that, you can still do something which is interesting for people, and then after some time, we found that the collaboration of the two of us is fruitful and we are enjoying that. So we were thinking about different projects, we (applied) audio-visual things like Vaclav’s video synthesizer, I was playing with old analog video gear and some sounds and we were going from digital to analog and with sound as well, and we were enjoying different stuff, different collaborations I would say, and a band, Vaclav was VJ-ing in a band and I was playing the Gameboy, and then there was a festival and I think this was one of the important moments; there was a festival organized by 4AM, it’s a forum for architecture and media, it’s a local crew doing interesting stuff, and they were organizing a big- it was more like a festival- a mediaart symposium, and an exhibition, and there
was a call for some projects, and we applied with like 5 or 10 projects because we were like ‘yeah, let’s do this!’ So we wrote so many papers there and then this lady, she was organizing them and she chose the Standuino project, and the Standuino project was about building a platform based on Arduino, so from the name you can see there is an Arduino present, but also Standuino, and Standa Filip** is the local dude representing the ‘bastl’ generation, and he was working, or he was teaching at our university, he was a really bad teacher but he was a great dude, and great in the way he was thinking about stuff, for instance, his first lecture about ‘introduction in to interactivity’ was about burning some transistors, so he brought transistors, 9 volt or 12 volt batteries, and he just burned them with an open flame. And we were like, yeah, that’s it, because before that, for us, we were studying media, and interactivity was more like jumping like a monkey in front of a Kinect, like these dudes have this idea, you have to do this, because this is art, and this was the total opposite, like destroying stuff. a different view on it. So we applied with Standuino, we feel that something changed in the world, with Arduino coming, it’s not only the field of engineers or super-educated dudes who can develop or do stuff, it’s coming to people like artists or pretty much everybody,
V: this project was a lot about DIY or open source electronics in general, it was not really focused on making music in the first place, but this is what we found out we’ve been doing mostly anyway, but there was this huge hype about electronics, open source, DIY, but we figured out that there is the local background, so we sort of wanted to make the platform to have a conversation about the local, and the global trend of open source. It was an open platform and it proved to be very useful for developing synths, and we made several workshops with that. Teaching people about electronics and synth building also,
stuff, so it was not really meant for developing this way, and we were more thinking about how you can buy cheap parts here in the local shop because here there are like 5 shops that you can walk in and buy parts, so you just buy cheap parts instead of buying expensive shields for the Arduino, and with this electronic background we have here, the knowledge shared between the older guys, like the fathers I was mentioning, but if you don’t know something you can always ask in the cue waiting for a part in the shop, because there is always a line, you join the line and then ask the first dude hey, how should I do this? And yeah, you get it. V: Basically all the stuff we’ve been making later we’ve had the prototypes made with the Standuino, so for instance a simple prototype of a sequencer and a synth but we also had the granular sampler prototype made on this development board, so it was used to try out ideas and see what we are able to do technically. So after a while, after half a year or a year we had several concepts of instruments that were working somehow, and we made some workshops with these (the prototype development boards) , but this is like really hard to make workshops, because you need to put a lot of wires and you need to connect stuff, so then we made special boards (for the dedicated instruments)
O: It was basically just a super-simplified Arduino, so it was low-cost but it had a huge field for prototyping, so you can solder stuff on it. So during this time we did some exhibitions here and (in the media) there were like guys from the west coming with Arduinos using wires or putting a glue-gun on it, like glue from the glue-gun to preserve some functions and
It’s funny to see it from today, to look back, we were doing these instruments and we were like, yeah, those are the instruments we want to play and we were building them in the workshops, but then we realized, first, it’s hard to build it in a workshop, and then, sometimes the interface would not be really perfect, like buttons are hidden under the wires, or are in weird places because you have space there, so we were playing with different finger combinations on it, and then we realized
that we needed to do some interface boards, it’s obvious when you think about the instruments now, of course the instruments needs an interface to play it, but it took us a while to figure out how to do that, and that we should actually do that, and it made all the workshops super-easy of course, you just put the parts in, and the interface was so much better because it was meant as an interface, V: because this is the same thing, these two are the same (prototype vs. dedicated instrument design)
some dudes, and we decided to cut out the Arduino thing, and all the hacking possibilities, and we were rebranding from Standuino, really referring to local DIY and Arduino, to Bastl Instruments, having the background still present in the name, but claiming that we are dudes developing instruments for musicians. Fixed instruments, so we put them in a case or enclosure and we stopped promoting the fact that you have to hack it to have perfect functions. It’s still possible of course. What we do now came from the Standuino, really, naturally.
O: But we were still thinking about these possibilities to modify the code or the hardware part, so we were promoting these things like, yeah, we are building these synthesizers here, but if you like to, you can download the code, you can add functions, you can add hardware, you can add switches, whatever. ‘You can hack it. We just add the ‘nails’ and you
can turn it into a sequencer!’
So you can do all these things. But later we realized that for musicians it’s not the best thing to know about your instrument that you can modify it, you can hack it, because it means at the same time that it’s somehow not perfect. You have to do something, you have to modify it, you have to change something to make it a perfect instrument. But we were pretty convinced that our instruments are good how they are. It was an option but not a need. And then we realized that we don’t want to do media, or interactive installation stuff, because on this platform we did a lot of projects, not only for us as artists, studying at art school, but for other artists, they were asking for, ‘yeah, I want this and that...’ and then we just went deep into the instruments and we don’t want to do installations for
We started the workshops with Standuino, then we put the interface on it, we did the workshops with the interface, we called it Fra Angelico, the first synthesizer, and then, in every single workshop there was somebody who was asking for another workshop somewhere else. So we were like, yeah of course we can come, just give us the date, and we were travelling with some workshops. But then we started to receive emails like, ‘yeah, I would really like to have a Fra Angelico but I’m from Japan, I’m not able to come for a workshop. Can you send me one maybe?’ And we were, yeah, well, how to do that, maybe we can solder one for this dude, right? And then we realized there is some demand for the instruments.
We didn’t realize this before. So it was coming to us, and we were building this stuff and sending it to people. And then one Japanese dude, Yamamoto San, he just wrote us an email; ‘I would like to sell it in the shops in Japan’ And we were like, what? That’s great! So what do you think we should send you? And he was like ‘yeah, send me something, but I need to take some money from that price, and then we realized that there is something like wholesale, and then we should probably think about the pricing, and send him like a box of it. And we were surprised by these new things coming. So we were like more following the stream, doing what we liked, and we were shaped by the outside.
V: It took us a long time to figure out that we are actually a company, and that what we are doing is a business. It took us a while to realize that. O: We realized it when PayPal stopped our account. Because we reached some (level) and then they were asking us to ‘prove our company things! ‘ And we were like, huh, what company? What? And then we realized that we were actually running a company. Then we made it official. (We’ve heard this story before, but it’s only natural. As soon as someone starts doing a lot of business through Paypal they want to upgrade you to an official business model account. Falafel: That’s the free market. The market is telling you you have a company, haha.) Modules: The story with the modules, there was one more experience, we were thinking how to go to people, and there was this Maker-Fair coming, and we got an email, like, hey, would be
great if you could come! And it was for free, you know, so we just had to pay for travel, and then we had a stand there, and we really introduced the first line of Trinity devices, as Bastl Instruments. So, we just re-branded, and we were like super proud of it and we came there and we realized that we are not makers... (insert irony) that we are not part of this community. Because there were all these 3D printers, printing heads of Homer Simpson, from plastic (or from metal) or whatever, and people were like, ‘okay, this is a nice noisey toy’, but there were no musicians around, and we were aiming towards musicians, it was our target group, but there were no musicians, there were kids, like willing to invest 15 euros for a noise-box for one afternoon, but no musicians. So we were super-disappointed, we didn’t sell anything, any single unit. (V: we sold a little bit though) O: We sold one set to a dude who was also exhibiting there. But not to the audience coming to the Maker Fair. V: Everybody was like: ‘How much?’ ‘Sixty.’ ‘Sixteen?’ O: ‘No: sixty; it’s a synthesizer! You can connect MIDI, you can play a keyboard, you can do crazy stuff with that, there is a sequencer, and a drum machine!’ (and then, you know, the reaction was; ‘Whaaaat?’ What do you mean? You can have all that on your laptop!)
So, the day we came home, the very same day, I just googled trade-fairs for synthesizers, and I found that there is something called the Frankfurt Musik Messe, and the same day I applied, I filled out the application and I went to sleep. I was so disappointed by this Rome experience. But the trip was great, I recently was thinking about that, it was out most beautiful trip, I think, it was amazing, it was our first trip outside like this, we spent some time in Germany before, and in the Netherlands too, but this was really different, Rome is really a beautiful city. So I applied for the Frankfurt Messe, and we brought the Microgranny 2, we just finished it, we came there, and we had the whole Trinity line as well. And for us it was really a success, we had contacts with shops, we had a lot of orders, and it was a big step for us, because then we were able to hire people, and build a company, grow the company. This is about 2 years ago. And we met Julian Schmidt there, from Sonic Potions, and he said ‘you should visit me, I live nearby, like 50 kilometers or something,’ so we went there, and we visited him, and we saw there - of course we saw it before- at Superbooth by Andreas (Schneider), but we saw his modular system, and we were sneaking around the drum machine he had, and of course we were talking about development, how he works, and stuff like that. But then we saw the modular, and we were like ‘what about this modular?’ That is cool. And then we bought the little Dieter from him- the Doepfer DIY synth- and he was actually wiring it to a front panel, right? So we bought this from him and we brought it back, and Vaclav was living in Vienna and I was coming to Vienna regulary too, because we were in the same school, and it was there, in a snack-box, and Vaclav
was patching this single module, and when I was there I was also trying to do something, and really late at night, I though ‘it sounds so great,’ Then I woke up in the morning and I heard my patch and it was crazy noise, but we were just patching this simple thing, and we had the poster from Alex4, on the wall, so there was that, and Little Dieter in the snack-box, and this was pretty much it. V: And a Benjolin, a few weeks later. O: The Benjolin, yes. And that was somehow the point when modules came to us, I think. V: And then the year after the Musik Messe we introduced the whole modular line.
O: It’s important to say that Vaclav was developing these as his Master Thesis in Vienna, at the Angewannte, we studied a course called ( ) and it was a really great project Vaclav did for his master thesis, and he chose the platform of modules to demonstrate his thing. So, it was the Alex4 poster, there was the snack-box, and then Vaclav’s master thesis, like all melting together, and then we went to the next Musik Messe with the first line of modules. But most of the modules were developed as a part of the master thesis.
Me: That’s interesting (I said that a lot). So you passed, I guess? They both laugh. O: Yes. But there was a funny story. There was a hamster controlling some stuff, by running the wheel, and it was controlling something in the rack, and there was one lady talking about crazy things, like, you have to save this hamster, it’s a nightmare, it’s torture, you know. That was funny. Me: So now you are a company, hiring people, dividing the work, making decisions that affect others. How is that? O: Yeah, but... we are more thinking about Bastl as a community rather than a company. We are not hiring people because we have certain positions, or we need something. We have basically different rules than what is usual in a company. So when there are guys like musicians from the town, supermotivated, really pissed-off about their crappy job, in I don’t know, in a cafe, or in shops selling trash, and thinking about the music, about the synthesizers and stuff. So, in the beginning some guys came to us, and they said, we know what you do here, and I’d like to be part of it. So this the way we grow. V: Yeah, we didn’t look for people, really, the people were just coming, and it sort of started to form a community around it. And then as we were with more people we were able to do more. I mean we could always say like, that’s it, this is the month we can produce, (?) Because there were the people that were willing to help and that had some skill-sets, that sort of formed, or that scaled us up, in to how it’s now. O: So when someone comes, we try to see what he’s good at, to see what he can do, and then we find that he is great at making coffee! So then we have a roasting machine, and we
are producing something we can call Bastl Coffee. I think it’s related with the synthesizers and the music, in general, like all the music, or most of the music is produced by the coffee, in the end. We are looking for these guys and we are happy to have a community here, so we have a really nice relationship with the guys working here. We are trying to, for instance we have something called the Bastl Library, so we have different synthesizers, like a bunch of modules and synthesizers you can borrow when you are part of these guys, so we have workshops every single friday, that starts with a patching workshop, so, how is it called in a factory? The shifts, they are shorter. And we have this time for self-education, so today Vavclav is going to show some tricks with the Tromso and the Dynamo modules, and Niels (Falafular), because he is here, is going to show the Proquencer, to the guys, and then we usually do something like, last week it was an introduc-
tion into radio stuff, and we were talking about how it works. So sometimes it’s about synth building, sometimes it’s about something totally different, but we are trying to educate us and not only to be the best instrument makers but also to be the best musicians, to be good in the stuff we are interested in and grow. Basically grow. Me: But what about when the ‘company’ becomes bigger and bigger? Will you not run into problems with this approach? V: I mean yeah, it’s always tricky to keep a good balance in the community, we need to, I’m not sure how much bigger we can grow in the number of people, or even if we should. I mean right now, it’s a good balance, I think, what we have. And yeah, we’ll see. There is one more guy coming next week. Then we will be about 20 people.
O: It’s always, taking care of the processes, and the company, when you grow, it’s always tricky. It’s easy to handle it when it’s the three of you, but it’s getting more crazy when it’s past five, and then when it’s passed ten, maybe. It changes everything because you are losing this super close personal relationship with them, and it’s more like, the relationship is changing slightly, even when it’s still warm and good, they maybe see you more like, ‘yeah, there is a company, and there is somebody who is running the company, and a master-engineer or something, and then we are employees, even if we talk and do things, when it grows it changes the perception of the company itself or of the community. Me: Somebody has to make the decisions. O: Yes. So it’s bringing stuff, but the good thing is that we are not really, you know, we are learning by doing, so. Like, Vaclav is getting better at engineering things, I hope I am getting better at running-the-company-things I would say, but I have to learn all these things mostly by experience. I ask them how many modules they sell, roughly, in one month. They don’t know. O: See? And that’s the difference between a company and a community! Because a company is based on turnover, on exact numbers, but we don’t know, sorry. (Laughter all around) Their line of modules at that point comes to 30 or 31, including expanders. Is the euro-rack boom over? How many more module manufacturers can the market handle? Seems like there never was
a niche before with so many boutique manufacturers. Every time you go on ModularGrid there seems to be a new brand added. V: You can always say the ‘boom’ is over, but... Me: The thing about modular is, I sometimes get the impression that a lot of people buy all this stuff but they don’t necessarily make ‘music’ per se? V: That’s what I like about it a lot. I mean, that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings about modular synths, is that everybody thinks it’s for making music... Me: It’s not? V: No, of course, it is also for making music. But I really like the fact that the modular synth doesn’t necessarily want you to make music, compared to a guitar or something.
If you have a guitar, you are forced to practice, and be good at it. But with a modular synth, it just wants you to play with it, you know? O: It’s leisure time also, it’s great to relax with. V: But of course it’s great for making music. O: When you say that the boom is over, I would say that the market has totally changed, it changed the amount of people interested in this stuff, so if it’s over or not, like anyway, there are so many people interested in that now, after the boom, if we want to call it a boom, V: I mean, there’s a real boom of people learning about synthesis, and understanding the processes in synthesis, and
there are a lot of modules that maybe people don’t understand fully, and people need to learn, and we’ve never had so much knowledge, and there are more and more demanding customers, which is great, they just need to be able to explore new territories. I think it’s exiting that there are so many people that have that knowledge. O: I think that’s the part of the modular boom, it’s part of the process of the education of musicians in general, there were not so many people understanding deeply synthesis and how the things are working, and we were all using some softwares, doing all these things for us, and then when you go more deeper you will find that there is something you can understand, and you can think about. I think that after years of all these people digging inside these things they came to the point that they actually understand the synthesis, and they found euro-rack somehow useful. They found modular useful because now we can actually use it. I think the next step is taking this part of the musical toolbox and expressing your musical intentions with it. Before it was maybe some synthesizer and guitars, something like that, to simplify it, now it can be that modular is also part of it, and then you can use something from the computer world and cross-patch it with something from another field of instruments. You can freely use it, it’s not going to be just some nerdy thing. The stand-alone instruments are not going away, however. They are now working with Peter Edwards (Casper Electronics) in developing various boxes. V: Peter moved here several months back and we made the Bitranger together, which was something he had in a quite advanced stage when he came so we finished that. We are
working on more projects together, so there’s going to be more things coming out soon. Peter is great to have here. O: We were super excited when he was visiting us, and he found this place nice to make synthesizers because there is all you need, pretty much. We have the tools, we have guys who can help with the soldering, we have all the connections with the distributors of parts and stuff like that. So for him it was, like, he moved here and it was easy to start to do something. We realized that it is great that we have this platform and we can collaborate. We were excited he decided to move here, and we finished this first project together, the Bitranger, and he is super-productive and he has some secret things in his mind, coming soon.
Me: Is that something you actively look for or does it just come to you, these collaborations?
O: When somebody asks about the company and everything, like we are talking now, about these things, we usually say that, the place where we are is just perfect for what we do. To be located in London or Amsterdam, or even Berlin, which is cheap, compared to Brno it’s expensive. So we have great conditions for it, we are not very far east, where you have to bribe everybody when you want to do something. V: We are ‘east’ enough. O: We are east enough to have cheap rent, we are in the city centre, outside the window there is the old town, and we can see only the tops of the churches. So we don’t have to be in some basement, in the suburbs. It is affordable, we are a big crew and we are all living from it, because it is so cheap to live here.
So we have great conditions. I think that in the past there were some cities with great conditions, like Berlin was, in the nineties. But Berlin now, there are like huge corporate things like Ableton or Native and it’s all gone, it’s expensive now, there is a huge scene and it’s still the electronic music capitol or whatever, but the conditions are not so good for starting a new brand of synthesizers. So I really respect the Koma guys, or Rebel Tech, all these guys making this stuff in these expensive cities. Because I guess it’s really hard and you should be re-
ally focused on the numbers and you should be tight on these things. V: To run it really tight. I mean, with our budget we are investing a lot of money into the community, and into this life, because we think we can do that. O: And yes, if there are people coming, friends visiting us, we are happy for that, we are happy that Niels is coming from time to time, and Paul Tas. We have a nice connection with the whole Dutch scene, and it’s great, the Dutch scene and us, we are closely connected. So when somebody decides to move here, like Peter, I think it’s great, to make a community, here, the community already exists, and then to invite more people, and share the space, and the tools, with other people. But also gigs, you know, we organize, and all these things, we like that. But we are not advertising that or pushing it. I think it’s just a nice place to live, at the moment, and to make synthesizers. Me: That’s amazing, really. I think, I guess, well, that in another place an operation like this would be much more secretive and competitive.
* Nicolas Collins (born March 26, 1954 in New York City) is a composer of mostly electronic music and former student of Alvin Lucier.[1] He received a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University.[2] Subsequently, he was a Watson Fellow. Nicolas Collins was “a pioneer in the use of microcomputers in live performance, and has made extensive use of ‘home-made’ electronic circuitry, radio, found soundmaterial, and transformed musical instruments.”[3] He has presented over 300 concerts and installations in Europe, Japan, and the United States as a solo artist and as a member of various ensembles.[4][5] He is a member of The Impossible Music Group with David Weinstein, David Shea, Ted Greenwald, and Tim Spelios. Collins is a prominent curator of performance and installation art, and has been a curator, policy adviser, and board member for numerous cultural organizations.[6] For example, in the early 1990s he was both artistic Co-Director at STEIM (Studio for Electro Instrumental Music), located in Amsterdam and a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) composer-in-residence in Berlin.[7] Collins is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Leonardo Music Journal, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the MIT Press.[8] He is also the chair of the sound department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[9][10][11] In 2006 Collins’ book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking was published by Routledge. An expanded, updated edition was published in 2009.[12] He was a major influence on the establishment of the Musical Electronics Library in New Zealand.[13] **http://cdm.link/2011/09/meet-the-little-known-diy-music-pioneer-ofthe-czech-republic-standa-filip/
‘The Next One Will Be Even Better!’