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What are some of the instruments Devo uses to give the band its unique sound?

Mark Mothersbaugh: For something to be unique, it has to be pretty special. Through most of my professional career, it has to be Logic Software, computer software for scoring music. But as far as something unique, it’s a category of instruments – it’s Circumvent. It’s been around for about 5-10 years. What it refers to is what my little brother used to do for Devo back in the early 70s where we would take toys and synthesizers that have already been factory wired and programmed, and we would reprogram and change the circuitry inside and give it a new use. He would repurpose electronic instruments and toys and make them into a new sonic device.

This practice seems to have become a trend in contemporary times…

There’s this new phenomena of kids, probably these nerdy, geeky, disgruntled, asocial kids that go down to the basement and take their little sister’s Fisher Price Speak and Spells and change the circuitry so that instead of it going ‘cat’ and ‘I am a cat’ now you hit the same buttons and it goes ‘Rrrrarrrawwwrwrrarr’… There’s a subgenre group of circuit vendors and they build them – I’ve bought things that have taken old calculating machines from the ‘70s and with all the buttons and numbers on it and they’ve repurposed the buttons and they play tunable notes … and you can tune all the notes on a calculator and you now have a new keyboard, a new programmer, a new trigger for your oscillator. It makes you think about music differently.

Do you think making these “new” instruments is revolutionary or counterculture in some way?

It’s subversive in a really creative way. Often times what adds a spark to something that’s otherwise cliché or dead when you use prepackaged samples or software synths of the designer whether you want to or not. The design of instruments you buy from a Kord or a Yamaha or Roland or Novation or any of those people, even the most transparent gear isn’t so transparent. Same with guitars, they aren’t transparent at all. There are six strings that are limited to how many notes that are on the scale. They have fret boards on them. They have all these things that predetermine how/what you are going to play. Even the shape of them determines the way you are going to play, whether you are going to use two hands and stay within a range of a certain musical tonality and musical notation. So it’s these crazy, screwed up, agents of chaos, toys and homemade devices, which I buy on the Internet and different websites that people are manufacturing. Maybe one of them is a cigar box where there’s 20 wires sticking up over the top and when you run your hand over the wires; it makes them feel the sound and it’s not like using a keyboard to trigger the music. So that was my secret weapon for the new Devo record was to use five or six of my favorite circumvent toys that I have.

What is the coolest thing about using these instruments?

I think it’s playing or hearing something you’ve never heard before. Just because of the shape and design of the instrument you are playing it makes you unconsciously … think and play music a certain way. If you’ve played music as long as I have, you say ‘I’ve played that before, that’s not new.’ Within myself at least, that’s a cliché and more than anything, I’ve heard other people play that too. If you are looking for new sounds and musical vocabulary I think leaving behind 12-tone scales is a good way to go and instruments from Guitar Center – I’m not saying close down Guitar Center – but you have so many musicians and artists creating music sonically, it’s more important to look for things outside of the box, to go shopping outside of Guitar Center for an instrument. I think the most important thing about these instruments is they make your brain hear things and do things creatively that you might not have been able to do using a 12-tone keyboard or guitar head.

Do you have any particular artists that you are fond of for doing such things?

Harry Partch—if you go listen to his stuff and see samples of his stuff, he was interested in these kinds of theories early on. His instruments make you think about music and play differently… Although the world is western-centric and westerners believe everything happens in Europe or here in the United States, the reality is we are only one small part in the world of music and the content of music and we are just one small part of what people have done around the globe, in centuries past and even right now.

Can you see them being used by a mass audience someday?

I think there are a lot of people who would never be able to open themselves to circumvented instruments. But that said, the sophistication of music listeners these days—between the time I was writing in the ‘70s—is so much wider now. The Internet has forever changed the way people think about music and art. It’s changed how artists think about music, it’s changed how audiences think about music and art, it’s changed the way art and music are formed now. When I was a kid, I’d go to a record store and I’d go past all the bins of Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Rodgers and Hammerstein and then there’d be this bin that would say ‘other stuff.’ In there you would find Sun Ra, Wild Man Fischer and Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and that’d be it. You couldn’t find music that wasn’t very western-centric. If there was World Music, it would be World Music that was filtered through western sensibilities and concept of what music was. Now you can go on the Internet and say ‘ I want to hear some ping-pong, Chinese, computer-generated death metal’ and you could put those four terms into a Google search and you’ll probably find a band that those four terms describe what that band sounds like. The Internet has changed the playing field forever.

No longer is it about the record industry having a hand on the faucet and their foot in the door and their foot stopping you from opening the door ad for about 70-80 years, record companies have determined what you had to listen to and what artists got to play music and they’ve traditionally been in this very limited category. Now, any kid can go to a Radio Shack and buy recording equipment that is much more sophisticated than the equipment that The Beatles recorded their first album on. They can start their own website, post their music on there and have their own audience without having to go through record companies or recording studios.

Do you wish you were younger now and making music for the first time?

A lot of people that could have been artists never were and now the playing field is more level. I’m jealous of the kids that are 20 now. I’d love to be 20 right now; it’s such a great time to be writing music and an artist. I’m happy I’m alive so I can still do it, but it would be so great to have the energy I had when I was 20 years old and how to present your art now with the possibilities of the Internet. It’s a shitty time to want to be a rock star because those days are going away fast. There will always be a few of those around. I mean even Lady Gaga, she’s one of the biggest selling artists and she’s sold 1.4 million records, I sold that many singles with “Whip It.” It was no big deal at the time. Back in those days, you sold 100 million records if you wanted to be impressive. That’s just an old way of thinking. Even thinking about records and all recordings, it’s just an old way of thinking about art and those days are over.

Devo’s latest album, Something for Everybody, is out now on Warner Bros.