Circuit – bending as a phenomenon was accidentally discovered by a teenage american boy, a young electronics enthusiast named Reed Ghazala, in the late 1960s. One afternoon in the general chaos of his workbench, a screwdriver fell from a table into an open drawer where a keyboard was lying in a state of mid repair .The tool by chance landed in such a way that it caused a short-circuit between two points of the exposed circuit board, creating a very unusual and distorted variation of the default sound which had been originally designed.
Ghazala pleasantly surprised by this accidental sound feast realised that he could make this random event a permanent state by connecting the two points on the circuit by cables and installing switches between them. This procedure as a general plan of action, opened up a world of possibilities of expanding the keyboards vocabulary, to include not only flute, violin, organ but also mosquito, vacuum cleaner, gunfire and underground train and so on.
So a genre, nay a phenomenon, was born. In the 21st century kids the world over are busy soldering away to transform keyboards, speak and spells, furbys, gameboys and all manner of innocent toys into evil musical instruments.
Live Without Dead Time 