When it comes to tech hobbyists, true brilliance is born not from an industrial mindset, but from an artistic one. Boutique synth-makers Chris Kucinski and Owen Osborn, founders of Critter & Guitari, embody this ethos naturally, taking their handmade instruments from the garage to the main stage.Equal parts artists and tinkerers, the college buds met amidst a confluence of digital music technological advances and found in each other kindred spirits. With the hands of installation artists and the hearts of musicians they came together as collaborators on a number of musical art pieces, the first—and their eventual company’s namesake—was the Guitari.
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Owen: I always liked the word toy. I always called instruments toys. I said that to a woman the other day and I didn't know she was a musician, it turns out she's a professional violinist, plays a Stradivarius and stuff. And I was like “Well instruments are just sophisticated toys.” But she didn't seem to mind it because I think most musicians understand.They call it playing right?
Owen: Exactly. You don’t get into music because it's an easy job, you get into it because you love it. I think toy is the perfect word, because it's something you want to play with on a childlike level. But then of course it has to have some complication to be interesting musically.
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Owen: Guitari was the name of an instrument I made a long time ago. It was a one-string electric guitar. It had one string down the neck, and you'd hold it against this electronic contact and it would really just spit out a voltage that you could use to control sounds in a computer. So the computer would do all the synthesis. You could play notes, it sounded like a theremin, and then you could also play samples, divide the neck into different parts of the samples. And then you could just affect other people’s sounds, running sound through it, and use it to control effect processors. It was more of an experiment. Critter was more of a vibe.We had this thing called the Critter board, which was like a whole line of electric boards. Critter became a code-word for stuff we were working on.Where did you meet?
Owen: At Skidmore College in 1998.Chris: He showed up to school with a bunch of banjos he'd made. And that was very inspiring. I'd played music but I had never made an instrument. But then he showed up with all these cool ones, and we started playing music together, and gradually over time we got more interested in building them. We went to school at a pretty cool time when DV video had just come out and Max MSP, C sound, supercollider, and Pro Tools. All that stuff had just congealed enough.Owen: All of a sudden, all this stuff was available on a personal computer, years of peoples work was suddenly exposed.
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Owen: We used to go up to this place, the Experimental Television Center outside Binghamton, New York. They had all this really weird video equipment for patching video signals together the way you would on an analog sound synthesizer. They had this giant modular video equipment. You could add colors, break the video signal into red green and blue colors, and then recombine it. You could slice up and blend different signals together into weird patterns, weird plaids.
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Owen: Yeah! Exactly.Tell me more about this art community you were involved with, Dear Raindrop.
Owen: I used to live down in Virginia Beach and I knew this kid named Joe in 8th grade and we started doing weird art projects and sculpture together. And then when I was at Skidmore I introduced him to Owen. Joe and his girlfriend had started working together and we all combined our interests and our abilities doing art shows, traveling the world. We'd make these interactive musical sculptures, like this big Sphinx, or these tiny video machines, but it was sort of a proving ground, or research laboratory. We'd learn what happens when you make something and there's only one of them and you'd have to leave it behind in another country, it's sort of sad. But it's great.For more from Critter & Guitari, check out these sick animations, part trippy cartoon, and part product advertisement. And find them online at Critter & Guitari.Critter & Guitari in the Art SpaceThe Bolsa BassThe KaleidaloopThe Pocket Piano controlling the musical tesla coils at David Blaine’s "Electrified."Follow Josh on Twitter - @jshmsh