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The Absinthe Drinkers members have several side projects going on. Check it out:
FreakNSpeak
This is a FreakNSpeak that I bought on eBay. It's a circuit-bent instrument, a Speak and Spell with scrambled brains. It makes really weird noises like garbled speech and has a theremin-like effect as well. I'l be using it for the first time in our Omphalos show at the Philly Fringe, and eventually I'll put a recording sample up here 'cause I knows you guys likes that sorta thing!
The Mnemosyne Array
Right after I got interested in circuit bending, I found these suckers for $5 each at Jomar Fabric Store. (Jomar sells bolts of fabric, and has all sorts of other weird stuff.) Anyway, this is a 5" diagonal black and white tv. I thought I'd get a bunch of 'em and put video into them, but that didn't work so well. Well, if you can't beat 'em, bend 'em! (Circuit bend 'em, that is!)
The first thing you learn about circuit bending is NOT to work on anything you plug into a wall. More dangerous than juggling chainsaws. However, the good folks over at Censtron have plans on their site (with the obligatory safety warnings) for transforming an old tv into a "sonic oscillator". Some of you may also have read about the wobblevision; similar concept. The basic idea is to rewire the set to an audio signal (say from a musical instrument) and the tv will go crazy bonkers displaying waveforms and other patters, in sync with the music. After some experimentation, I was able to come up with several different patterns that reacted to music.
Simply put, a black and white tv has four wires connecting the picture tube to the tv board. Two wires control the horizontal; two control the vertical. By cutting these wires and connecting an audio input to two of the wires on the tube, you've substituted your audio signal for the signal the tube would normally receive from the video board. Additionally, you can change the remaining connections as well. For instance, you could wire the two horizontals to your audio input and wire the two verticals on the tube to the two horizontals on the board. And you can mix and match these in several different combinations. The photos at right show the picture tube and the wires I cut.
Very quickly, these sets took over my life! I spent several months experimenting working through the different patterns I could get. Also, since I wanted to use these during one of The Absinthe Drinker shows, I had to figure out how to wire these quickly, cheaply, and safely AND build a rig to hold them that was sturdy and easy to assemble/disassemble.
For quickly wiring each set, I found these little European style terminal blocks that were a lot quicker than soldering or braiding/electrical tape. Since I liked the way the tv shells looked, I wanted to modify the external case as little as possible. I was able to route the wires from the terminal block through an existing hole in the back of the set. Another benefit to using the terminal blocks is that it allows me to easily change how the set is wired without opening the set back up. In the above photo, there's three blocks: one for the tube, one to the board, and internal speaker connection. Wires come out the back end of the set into another terminal block that I can rewire at will.
Once I had the sets wired and the cases re-assembled, I had to build a housing for them. I considered many options and finally decided on PVC pipe.
It took me a while (and A LOT of trips to HomeDepot!) to figure out the PVC thing. I don't want to go into it all, but I can tell you that licking the PVC didn't help any.
With the help of John Monge, our guitarist, we finished getting the sets in the arrays and wiring them up. Each sub-array of 3 sets has two 1/4" inputs, one for vocals and one for bass. Each set will get either a bass signal or a vocal signal. We have 3 sub-arrays in our first 9 set array.
Whew! That's it. Like everything else involved with building the Mnemosyne Array, writing up this description took longer than I thought. Oh, and since our show is titled Omphalos and touches on myth and fate, I named each set after a muse from Greek mythology.
I have enough sets to build another array of 9. Hopefully, I'll have it done by next year's Fringe Festival!