The history of music technology is littered with happy accidents. Think Roland gear being misused to create house music, circuit bending and chiptune supplying extreme beats and melodies, and Kraftwerk's DIY gear ethic basically creating everything else. But now there's a new genre in town created by extreme technology abuse. It's 'accidental techno', and all you need is a torch and radio.
Marc Hasselbalch has shared a video of a kick drum pattern being created by the interaction between a battery operated torch and a Sony radio, and the results are a lot more mesmerising than that sounds. There's deep quality to the kick, a sidechain effect, and an ambient static noise that has a new strain of lo-fi writ large all over it.
We're not sure if Marc is the producer behind the video, or indeed how he (or whoever it is) stumbled upon the effect. Maybe he was using a torch to fix the radio and discovered it was still working well enough to produce a rhythmic beat as the light waves and radio waves interacted on an audio spectrum. (Yes, we clearly don't understand physics well enough to get what is going on, but that certainly sounded feasible to our ears. Impressive, eh?)
Or maybe he just has way too much time on his hands and not enough cash to splash on a decent lo-fi music device. In which case, hats off to him.
The video has so far captured over 100,000 views and the imagination of several producers the world over – which makes it a new music genre in our books – with one commenter stating: "Move over accidental jazz, now is the era of accidental techno".
Another says - as we initially thought - "Wow it even has sidechain compression," with the best response to that being, "whatever the hell that means". Don't you just love YouTube comments.
What we really do love is anyone and anything that utilises non-conformist gear to make music; as fans of the godfathers of the idea such as Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk, we think that anyone who takes an everyday object – a calculator, food blender, massage device – and makes sweet beats and melodies from it simply has to be applauded.
The approach is yet more fuel for the lo-fi fire that seems to be sweeping music production gear at the moment. When we started making music, it was 90% about reducing tape hiss between tracks; now it's all about adding tape hiss and other lo-fi elements to 90% of what you do – great news in our books.
And for no other reason than to plug some recent articles, here are a couple of links to some recent lo-fi gear we've looked at - the Torso Electronics S4 and Kiviak Instruments Wo-Fi.
Whether Roland, Akai, or Polyend will come up with a torch-based drum machine is yet to be seen, but we'd put good money on the fact that Sonicware has a 'Torchware' in development right now, and that Behringer will have its own version in the shops a few months later for half the price.
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