Top Five Modified Toy Orchestra (and MTO-Adjacent) Albums
(Brian Duffy is a Birmingham, England-based musician who uses reclaimed objects as electronic instruments. Modified Toy Orchestra, my favorite of his projects, takes abandoned children’s toys, tinkers with their circuitry, and composes strange and beautiful electronic symphonies out of the results. Physical releases of their music can be hard to find, but all of it is available for listening or downloading via their Bandcamp page. Duffy’s other projects are System Error, which arranges music from from the glitches, hisses, and background noises made by samplers with no input signals (“We wanted to reveal the hidden voice of sampling technology and play the samplers rather than the samples”), and ZX Spectrum Orchestra, a “chiptune” band that sources all its sounds from programmed Sinclair ZX Spectrums, an inexpensive 8-bit home computer released in the UK in 1982. I’ve combined releases by all three of these projects here, arranging my list in order of preference.)
Plastic Planet by Modified Toy Orchestra (2010)
Nothing by System Error (1997)
Toygopop by Modified Toy Orchestra (2006)
Basic Programming by ZX Spectrum Orchestra (2006)
Unclaimed EP by Modified Toy Orchestra (2015)
— December 28, 2021