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Meet Reed Ghazala, the Father of Circuit Bending

A special rebroadcast of episode three of season one of Sound Builders, our show about noise.

Listen up: We're running a special rebroadcast of the first season of Sound Builders, our show about noise (and the people rethinking how to make it), all week on Motherboard. We hope it tides you over until the forthcoming season of Sound Builders, which you can catch on Motherboard next month.

First, let's revisit Reed Ghazala, who's been called the father of circuit bending.

"I've been accused of starting the first electronic art movement," Ghazala told us back in 2010. "If that's true, that was better than the other things I could've done."

Clad entirely in purple, a sort of modular J. Mascis, Ghazala showed us his boyhood home in suburban Cincinnati—where the chance-driven sound generating technique was born in the late 1960s—before we holed up at his Anti-Theory Workshop on the other side of town. There, he played our flesh (seriously) and an array of other manipulated consumer electronics, all blipping and blorping to the rush of simply not knowing what you're going to get when you bend, say, a children's toy radio.

Stay tuned for the premiere of our next season of Sound Builders right here on Motherboard.

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