The circuit bender: Galen Richmond. (photo/Matthew Bessinger, courtesy Richmond)

The Unheard Music
Galen Richmond: sonic pioneer

By Isaac Kestenbaum

Galen Richmond is looking for a new sound. Not a new arrangement of existing notes, but something that’s never before been heard by human ears.

Richmond hopes to coax this new sound out of old technology: vintage electronic keyboards, talking calculators, and speaking toys from the 1980s. He probes the circuit boards of these devices with two jeweler’s screwdrivers connected by a wire, creating sounds the manufacturers never intended. When a short circuit produces a sound he likes, Richmond wires a switch or knob to the instrument so he can reproduce it.

This process is called circuit bending. It’s been around for about a decade and is slowly entering the mainstream. Richmond [an occasional Bollard freelance contributor] read about it two years ago on the Internet. At the time, he’d been playing in indie-rock bands for nearly a decade. “When it was really good with the bands that I was playing in, we were continuing a discussion that had been started by all those bands in the ’80s and ’90s,” said Richmond, who lives in Portland’s West End. “But it never felt like we were making something brand new.”

Circuit bending was different. “This feels like you can open up an instrument — or even a calculator — and just find a sound that has literally never, ever, ever, ever been heard before,” he said. “I can’t think of any other venue that has that amount of discovery readily available to anyone.”

Richmond performs as Computer at Sea, a name he took from a setting on a stereo he once had. “It really seemed to fit, for me, the feeling of what I’m doing,” he said. “You know, sort of lost technology just bouncing around.”

Richmond received a $1,400 Good Idea Grant from the Maine Arts Commission last year. He plans to use the money for circuit-bending supplies, but he’s also interested in installation pieces, which he sees as a continuation of his musical work.

He recently finished an interactive piece for the new exhibit at SPACE Gallery: a platform wired with drum synthesizers, devices that change vibrations into tones. Light sensors surrounding the platform change the pitch, rate and volume of the tone. “Basically, the idea is that your footsteps will trigger the sound, and your body moving around will modify it,” Richmond said.

Richmond’s first installation was something he called a “noise library.” It consisted of a number of discarded library books that he hollowed out and filled with his own circuits. When plugged into a speaker, each produced a different sound. Richmond installed the project inside a former military battery as part of The Sacred & The Profane, the annual art and performance festival on Peaks Island.

For last fall’s Sacred & Profane event, Richmond built a giant zoetrope: a spinning drum with slits cut into it, one of the earliest forms of animation. The modern version of the device, invented in 1834, was famously used to create the impression of a horse in motion. Richmond used his zoetrope to animate images from Yar’s Revenge, the classic Atari video game.

Richmond recently turned 30, but looks much younger — an impression accentuated by his shaggy blond hair and brightly colored t-shirts. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Maine, but has decided to postpone studying psychology in graduate school to focus on circuit bending. “I feel like I’m learning too much with this stuff to take two years off,” he said.

Three nights a week — and on many weekends — Richmond can be found in his one-room studio, situated above an antique store in downtown Portland. It has wooden floors, high tin ceilings with peeling paint, and large windows that look down on the busy intersection of Congress and High streets. One table holds most of Richmond’s performance equipment: keyboards, drum machines, a talking toy, a vintage camera — all sprouting knobs, lights, and metal switches.

Richmond played an impromptu concert for a few visitors on a recent evening. He began by pressing a few buttons, and a rattling drumbeat started. Then he manipulated the tape reels on a Nixon-era answering machine as if he was scratching a record, and the voice of a man leaving a message nearly 30 years ago joined the drums. Richmond went on to play a sequence of ethereal notes on a keyboard, then began weaving in electronic beeps, preset keyboard rhythms, and the chirping of a Vtech Talking Whiz Kid Plus. As he pressed keys and flipped switches, he looked like a cross between a DJ and a man piloting an experimental aircraft. At one point he used a joystick to adjust the pitch of the music.

Modifying all this equipment requires specialized parts. Richmond orders many supplies from a four-inch-thick catalog full of dense, technical writing. He also makes weekly visits to HR Distributors, an electronic-parts company near an abandoned video store in Bayside. Founded in 1989, the store still has some artifacts from that era, like old computer chips and resistors. Nothing is marked with a price, and Richmond is usually the only customer without a company account.

Not all of Richmond’s modifications are original — there is a tradition of sharing knowledge in the circuit-bending community — but he has a few unique designs, like the talking calculator he’s joined to an oscillator. The device sounds like a metronome attacking a robot mathematician.

Is this one of those never-before-heard sounds? “That sort of sound, and the variety of sound that it’s putting out, is common to a lot of circuit-bent stuff,” Richmond said. “But this specific sound I’m pretty certain wasn’t around before.”

Richmond’s latest installation can be experienced as part of Sound and Vision: Circuit, Tube, and Prism, showing at SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland, from Fri., Jan. 9, through Sat., Feb. 21. Opening reception: Fri., Jan. 9, from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. (artist and curator talk from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.). For more on Richmond’s music, visit myspace.com/computeratseamusic.

Click here to listen to “Sullen Lamp Lighters” by Computer at Sea and read David Pence’s review.  

Isaac Kestenbaum recently graduated from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, where this piece originated. He lives in Portland.