Lemon grove kids meet the monster
By David Cotner 10/04/2007
In Santa Paula, Citrus Capital of the World, where the most avant-garde thing to happen in recent memory was the opening of a Bob’s Big Boy Express and the most forward-thinking proposal put forth by the city stepfathers is the repurposing of the formerly majestic Tower Theatre into a (wait for it) Mexican restaurant, somewhere near one of the town’s largest trees lives a happy man and his willowy wife and their subsequently joyful baby.
Cameron Leggett, habitué of the thankless outsider arts world of Ventura County for almost 20 years, creates an altered beast of new sound and progressive thought through a process known as circuit-bending, in which the fiddling of circuits in the guts of disused electronic children’s toys like the Speak & Spell create unexpected and random new noise. A typical day at their place involves Leggett’s experiments on circuits in old children’s toys and the hum of labor from the Lettre Sauvage studio printing press run by his wife, Fiona. The baby has no comment.
I caught up with him recently, and, foolishly following the journalistic imperative for the subject to tell all, received this reply:
“I’ve been recording with my friend Keith who lives about [two] miles North of my house. We both have audio labs … Keith and I have done a couple of short film soundtracks, both non-paying; one was a film about a postman with undeliverable letters, the other was about illegal street racing in Tokyo. When I’m on my own, I just sample randomness on a mid-90’s Roland DJ-70 (basically a keyboard version of an S-760 with the DJ detested turntablesque scratch pad, which I live for). I attempt to make some nice loops and let them hold in a sequence while I noodle around on my Sequential Circuits Six-Trak (got it for $85 at the Santa Paula Goodwill).
In about 1995, our mutual local friend Jon Booth of Realization Recordings got me started on the Anti-Theory ideas of [circuit-bending pioneer] Qubais Reed Ghazala. I went on a buying spree in all the local thrift shops seeking out the Casio and Texas Instruments shards of electronic holy grailty. My favorite circuit-bent toy for the moment is a Casio SK-60. I wasn’t sure about bending it at first, but ultimately decided that it needed a line out and while you’re in there with a soldering iron and some probes ... Anyway, the SK-60 is a very cheesy sampler that was aimed at wannabe swing/doo-wop adolescents or something like that. If you played [Piero Umiliani’s] “Mah Nà Mah Nà” on it, you’d be pretty close to the intended Muppet audience. You can take this out into the woods and make completely frightening sounds since it runs on batteries and requires no effects or outside layering or sequencing. It’s really is a nasty little monster. Sounds like John breaking Philip’s Glass Cage while Reich and Stockhausen gleefully snicker, fart and burp in the background.
In my experience, virtualized existence isn’t about Second Life, World of WarCraft, MySpace or First Person Perspective. It’s about commuting and serving a machine or process that is not preserving, entertaining, and improving human existence. Perhaps all this technology really is just Orwell’s ‘boot in the face’ for all eternity, but even boots wear out eventually ... or maybe you just outgrow them ... or like a true Luddite, hurl them into the gears.”
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