Someone had uploaded New Sounds From Old Circuits, the 3 track Modified Toy Orchestra EP released on Static Caravan in 2002, to YouTube. It’s a long way from A Grand Occasion and fascinating to see Brian starting to put the pieces together.
The article needs some serious work and there are plenty of citable sources on this blog. Get to it folks.
2007 Italian TV report on MTO playing at the Dissonanze festival. The narration is an Italian translation of Brian’s interview which you can turn back in to English using YouTube’s caption translation tool, with fantastic results.
“The spectacle of stones made by your eyes stream composed five musicians on the digital terrestrial each of us are a number modified toy music instrument with no input of sex together always my laptops and therefore why dreams only with these tools.”
30 minute BBC Radio 4 documentary on Brian’s hero Bucky Fuller.
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an eccentric polymath. Perhaps best known for his innovative geodesic dome designs - a version of which feature at the Eden Project in Cornwall - he was also an inventor, a poet and a philosopher, who wrote scores of books and criss-crossed the globe giving idiosyncratic free-wheeling lectures that lasted for hours.
In all of his varied work, Buckminster Fuller was dedicated to principles of sustainability, to doing ‘more with less’ and striving to ‘make the world work for 100% of humanity’. He influenced a generation of designers and architects - including Norman Foster and Richard Rogers - and was an inspiration to the environmental movement.
Buckminster Fuller was ahead of his time and his principles are arguably more relevant now than ever. But today, almost thirty years after his death, he’s a largely forgotten figure.
In this programme, the writer Tom Dyckhoff talks to Bucky’s colleagues and commentators about what we can learn from Buckminster Fuller today. Featuring Fuller’s grandson Jaime Snyder, architect Norman Foster, sculptor Antony Gormley, writers Bryan Appleyard and Alice Rawsthorn, and Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation
Mucho linkage by Things Magazine on a subject close to our hearts.
Nice short review of the Aldeburg gig from Les Bicknell, ending with this question: “Got me thinking - who are the modified toy orchestra’s audience - having seen them three times as part of faster than sound - one a gig (people dancing), one as part of an electronica session (chin stroking) and last night sort of a bit of both. “
Short video clip of the Modified Toy Orchestra at Aldeberg last week. (The whole thing was recorded apparently but won’t be uploaded for some weird reason…)
Brian Duffy: It came from a dissatisfaction with my own habit, a tendency to approach the instrument that i know such as piano or guitar with the same kind of patterns, I became frustrated with this and the tendency for music to become confessional or autobiographic. I was looking for a way to break my own habits and also to remove the ego/self reference from the compositional process. I had all ways modified things to suit my own needs and had modified some toys mainly looking for sources of novel sounds to sample. In 1999 I started to realize that the toys had within them hidden worlds of possibilities, not only for new sounds but new ways of playing /composing and breaking my own habits
About me
A fan-blog for Brian Duffy, his Modified Toy Orchestra, and related endeavours.
BDHABB is also on The Twitter
This blog has no connection with Brian Duffy, Warm Circuit or anything like that. It's a homage, a monument of love. We love you Brian.
"Brian Duffy, award winning sound artist and creator of the Modified Toy Orchestra, has been at the forefront of a world wide underground movement called circuit bending which involves rescuing childrens electronic toys from car boot sales, and converting them into new strange and wonderfully sophisticated musical instruments. Taking them apart, he finds new connections hidden within each toys circuits that reveal new sounds, exposing the surplus value of redundant technology. The toys are then reassembled including switches and dials with which to control this surplus value. The results of this process can be shockingly beautiful, funny and extreme and have led to Brian being labeled a genius, a madman, and a national treasure."
