The Bent Festival is an annual art and music festival celebrating DIY electronics, hardware hacking, and circuit bending. Each year we invite artists from across the country and around the globe to perform music with their home-made or circuit bent instruments, teach workshops to adults and children alike, create beautiful art installations and to generally come together, face to face, and showcase the state of the art in DIY electronics and circuit bending culture.
Alpha-Bit is an evolving group of visual, performance and sound artists from the lower Hudson area who use scratch built electronic and circuit bent instruments in their performances. Approaching the ideas of noise as an aural parallel to the visual experience of a Pollack painting, Alpha-Bit explores the textures and nuances that become available when audio is both freed from and juxtaposed against the fixed structure of rhythm and melody. Their constantly growing and evolving collection of available sound generating devices currently includes individually crafted instruments that utilize creative and expressive interfaces, such as a rhythmic oscillator that is controlled through the pulsing of a strobe light, and vintage circuit bent instruments, like the Radio Shack Spell&Learn and the Yamaha DD6 digital drum. Special for this Bent Fest performance, one of the members is working on creating a light/sound reactive unitard. This is not to be missed!
This wild experimental artist from Chicago uses electric kazoos, tape loops, and more to craft far-out, wonderfully confounding songs. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 15, 2021
A brave experimental record from the Cecilia Lopez & Ingrid Laubrock running darting sax lines through dense electronics & processing. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 10, 2023
Described as a series of “self-exorcisms,” “Ego De Espinhos” is a brain-melting foray into experimental electronics. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 4, 2019
Persuasion’s “Quartermass” EP is a collection of dark, dubby techno, with an emphasis on deep rhythms and ghostly tones. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 8, 2018