Bed, math, and beyond
Sacramento producer Chachi Jones bends circuits and rules.

By Peter Nicholson

BEDROOM PRODUCERS HAVE ended up with a bit of a bad name. While once it was cool and unusual to make music in your room with a pile of machines, the advent of affordable production tools has stolen some of the activity's thunder, as practically everyone's boyfriend claims to be making tunes at home. Here in the Bay Area, you can't swing a sampler without hitting a bedroom producer, or at the very least a DJ with a few sequencers and a soft synth on his Mac. But though a little geek chic goes a long way and, honestly, most bedroom producers probably should stay under wraps, Chachi Jones (otherwise known as Donald Bell) is one home artist who deserves to move on up and maybe even – gasp – quit his day job someday.

With a wonderfully dense 2003 album on Lunaticworks, Claustrophilia, and an unusual array of homemade instruments, the 25-year-old Jones is gaining recognition beyond the small circle of electronic musicians who call Sacramento home. He even hit the geek big time, as he put it, when XLR8R magazine used him as the feature model for its recent tech supplement.

But Jones isn't letting all this relative glory go to his (egg)head: he wrote a letter to XLR8R's editors thanking them for the profile, saying that it went a long way toward convincing his parents he really wasn't just jacking off in his bedroom studio. The focus of the magazine piece, and what initially caught my eye on the press release, was Jones's penchant for hot-wiring electronic toys and basic instruments, harnessing their sounds to his needs. Armed with a soldering iron and some basic switches (including contacts that run the low-voltage current through his body, which he uses as a variable resistor), Jones victimizes Speak 'N Spells and their ilk, then sells his modified versions on eBay and through San Francisco shop Robotspeak, where he performs and speaks this week. The glitchy, mutant sounds that result have an alien yet familiar quality, like an android retelling a childhood story.

Turf wars

Jones wasn't the first to come up with this idea. In fact, Reed Ghazala, the generally acknowledged godfather of circuit bending, as the practice is known, has even sent Jones a letter admonishing him for profiting from a practice Ghazala sees as his own. Shrugging off such territorial sour grapes, Jones credits a Sacramento musician by the name of Big Tex as his entry point into this unusual art. "The dominant music culture [in Sacramento] is this pop-punk, Cake-meets-Deftones type of rock 'n' roll. But secondary to that is this little cabal of noise and experimental [music] people," Jones says as he explains how he ran into his c-bending mentor.

We're sitting at the kitchen table in his ground-floor apartment in a pleasant neighborhood that belies Sacramento's reputation as a place to be avoided at all costs. "I went to a house party in Davis, and there was a guy playing there named Big Tex," Jones recalls. "His whole thing is circuit-bent gear run through racks of effects, doing it all live, no computers or anything. Before then I was a thrift-store junkie. I had a good stockpile of Speak 'N Spells and weird instruments that I collected."

With Big Tex's guidance, Jones performed basic circuit surgery on a 1991 Casio Rapman keyboard, which he still has and occasionally uses. "At first it was a thing where I was like, 'Well, that'd be cool if I could get some interesting noises out of these things and use 'em for a song,' and then it just kinda took off," he says. "In Claustrophilia you can hear the results of my first circuit-bending stuff, where I didn't sample it directly but I use it for raw material."

Morphing soundscape

Though circuit bending has certainly given Jones a marketing hook, he sees it only as one of the many tools at his disposal. "Except for the Kayzio EP, I wouldn't consider it a really necessary piece of how I make my music, but I definitely like having it around because it produces just bizarre tones that I wouldn't be able to get from anything. Or at least I couldn't get it immediately from anything else," he explains.

The songs on 2002's Kayzio (Crunchpod), Jones's most recently composed work available, were created entirely from circuit-bent sounds. It's not the most inviting soundscape, but it's certainly inventive, with throbbing, rubberlike bass lurking below insectile scratches and jittery clicks. The final track of four, "Zibble," is particularly effective as its initial apparent randomness coalesces into an eerie reverie. While Kayzio hovers at the aggressive edge of accessibility, Claustrophilia begins there before moving a bit to the center with breaks that are more approachable and stately keys recalling the intricate majesty of Plaid.

Jones's work is heavily influenced by Warp Records, but the debt is one more of mood and ideals than specific sounds. "I don't think I'm operating in a bubble at all.... Each song is independently inspired by something I'm reaching for, that I heard in someone else's work. And what results is so far from what I actually hoped it would be that I don't really feel like it's too derivative. I've never been good at copying someone else's work," he says, laughing. The gently undulating and clicking "Brown," for instance, references the minimalism of Mille Plateaux artists like SND, but Jones has enough quirks to set his own course from these points.

Off the radar

Part of Jones's unique approach is undoubtedly influenced by his choice of residence. Sacramento doesn't exactly have an international reputation as a hot spot of electronic music. But it fits just right for someone who grew up in Fremont, which he cites as a "good foundation for being bored and getting into music.... What I like about Sacramento is that it is just cultural and urban and progressive enough that you don't feel like you're too detached from what's going on in the Bay Area ... [and] I'd be living in an apartment the size of my bathroom if I tried to live in the Bay Area." Sacramento's relative dearth of nightlife also may factor into Jones's style, removing the temptation of crafting music suitable for a specific scene or DJ.

Though Claustrophilia in particular has moments of burbling acid and frenetic breaks, these aren't songs designed to be smoothly mixed into one another. They lurch and startle, and their beauty often requires repeated listens before patterns reveal themselves. I discovered my initial take on the album – accomplished, if a bit messy – changed considerably when I found myself with an hour to kill and Claustrophilia in the car stereo. Sitting in a damp parking structure, I cranked up the volume and the minutiae of Jones's music trickled from one channel to another as the album's true complexity and care became clear. To some, strong songwriting implies unforgettable hooks and emotive lyrics, but Jones's thoroughly detailed and intricately realized compositions are my kind of wonderful.

To Jones's thinking, this may put me in decidedly unglamorous company. "When I talk to people about my shows, and try to explain who's going to be there, more often than not I say 'sound geeks.' People who are just really geeky and try to be up on what's new and what's progressive," he offers. "Usually that will cross beyond those boundaries.... They'll be out to see Alison Krauss one weekend playing country and Kid606 the next. Their love for music is just a love for what's new and interesting and progressive and genuinely talented." Trading the bedroom for a club full of music nerds might not excite some performers, but Jones seems content: those geeks are the ones who know what's going on.

Chachi Jones performs and leads a clinic and discussion Sat/11, 2 p.m., Robotspeak, 589.5 Haight, S.F. Free. (415) 554-1988.