There’s a lab in the attic. Noam Schatz is leading me up there. “Watch your head,” he says from around a bend.
And then I’m in the middle of a dimly lit workbench wonderland, where Schatz tinkers with old keyboards and electronic toys. They’re things you often find cheap at flea markets or tag sales. Like his prized Casio SK-1, a long-gone model that can fetch $100 on eBay but cost him a measly five bucks; it’s still emblazoned with its yard sale, Sharpie-written price tag.
A closer look shows that Schatz has tricked out his plastic keyboards with extra switches, buttons, sliders and knobs, all of which allow him to tweak and mutate the instrument’s original beats and tones into totally new sounds and textures. It’s an art called “circuit bending.”
Schatz will improvise with his favorite modified keyboards and toys at a show entitled “Exploratory Devices,” the first concert in a new music series at Click Workspace in Northampton (the old Antique Center space on Market Street).
George Langford of the band Javelin is the headlining act (promising an improvised set that will encourage audience participation), and Schatz, under the name 3rdness, starts off the evening. Tonight at 7 p.m.
I first met Schatz when he was drumming for Mobius Band, a trio that came out of Wesleyan University and took the Northampton music scene by storm circa 2001. It was during those days that he started messing with keyboards. “I wasn’t one of the songwriters, so I had all this extra creative juice,” he said.
He read an interview with the English electronic duo Autechre, in which they mentioned they’d opened up an SK-1 and poked around inside, throwing metal stuff against the innards and getting inspired results. Schatz was intrigued. He unscrewed the back of his own SK-1, threw in his car keys and a quarter, and the ensuing crazy noises were love at first hear.
Schatz was further inspired by musician Ryan Olcott (who had the first keyboard Schatz had ever seen souped up with extra switches) and the internet (“A great resource for some random weirdo hobby like that,” he said). He got deeply into circuit bending.
“With a certain era of electronic toys and keyboards, you can go in and deliberately short circuit them,” he explained. “You’re connecting two points that aren’t meant to be connected at all. You solder the two points on a switch, so whenever you want to, you can flip the switch and make it freak out. The electrons start dancing around in awkward ways, finding weird paths.” And then, when you turn off all the switches, the keyboard reverts back to normal.
Schatz had never been the kind of kid who dismantled things to see how they worked, but he got “really really into” his new hobby. “They’re kind of toys, but kind of bad-ass,” he said of the cheap keyboards. “They do amazing things, especially when you start to monkey with them.”
For a demonstration, he turned on the SK-1 and got a disco groove going. A jolly little tick-tock, pick-pock drumbeat pumped out of the amplifier behind him. He flipped one of his hand-installed toggle switches on the keyboard and the rhythm began to stutter. Each added switch mutated the sound further, first saturating it with distortion, then warping it to sound like a funky car alarm, then degenerating into avant-garde ominous pulses, like Gil Melle’s experimental soundtrack for the 1971 movie “The Andromeda Strain.”
The SK-1 is a sampling keyboard, so Schatz leaned into its built-in microphone and yelled “Hey-ya!” By flipping various switches, he made his voice loop, then split into two, then become a muffled distorted note seemingly at the bottom of a well, then transform into digital static splotches, like sound effects in an old Atari game.
Hidden among the switches were what looked like little silver BB pellets; these were “body contacts.” Schatz ran his fingers over them and the keyboard notes turned spooky with vibrato, like a theremin, or the moaning of a ghost in a haunted house.
He broke out more modified contraptions. A toy megaphone. A thin, blue plastic guitar-ish thing for kids called Cool Keys. A Speak & Math toy with built-in robotic chatter, perfect for playfully chopping up and experimenting.
He showed off a synthesizer he built from scratch using a small cardboard box, fitted with a light sensor — the brighter the light burning near the sensor, the higher the pitch it creates.
Elsewhere on the plywood workbench was a drum machine, to which Schatz had added a hand-built “breakout box,” a kind of patch bay made out of roofing nails. He’d connected each pin on the circuit chip hidden within to a numbered nail on top. Using alligator clips and weaving pieces of metal between the nails, he could then freak out the rhythms in nearly infinite ways.
Years ago Schatz was selling tiny handmade synthesizers on eBay — small enough to fit inside an empty prescription pill bottle. One of his orders was from Adam Horovitz, aka Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys. They began corresponding and soon Ad-Rock was asking Schatz if he could turn an old hand-held Mattel football game into a drum machine. He could, and he did.
“It was probably the most well-designed thing I’ve ever built,” said Schatz. Horovitz loved the result so much he used it in a Beastie Boys song, “Too Many Rappers,” the lyrics of which give a shout-out to circuit benders.
At tonight’s Click Workspace show, Schatz will be improvising completely, creating sound in the moment, a mad scientist among his creations.
“I just let the instruments guide me,” he said. “A certain amount of it is following your ears. Things can get noisy and out-of-hand, and that’s part of the fun.”
Ken Maiuri can be reached at clublandcolumn@gmail.com