Watch This Japanese DIY Collective Turn Barcodes Into Live Techno Music

Imagine walking into a concert where the lead synth is a barcode scanner and the rhythm section is powered by a television from 1983. That’s the world of ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS!, a Japanese collective rewiring the obsolete into the operatic.

At the center of the imaginative collective is Ei Wada, a Japanese artist whose life’s mission, spurred by a childhood vision of a music festival at the base of a crab-legged CRT tower, has led him to orchestrate a nationwide symphony of scavenged electronics. Techno meets the trash heap with ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS!, now nearly 100 members strong across six Japanese cities.

Their playground is a graveyard of archaic technology from relatively recent history. Tube televisions become percussion instruments while ventilation fans morph into synths. As Japan and the world confront the mounting waste of outdated tech, ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS! offers the unexpected solution of turning it into music.

In one of their most compelling inventions, barcodes are scanned to make improvisational techno. Their so-called “barcoder” generates sounds by connecting signals of a barcode scanner to a speaker.

Check out footage from the performance below.