Everything old is new again at the New Forms Festival, Vancouver's ever-growing annual investigation into electronic music, avant-garde videos, performance art, and various other hybrid media. Re:Use is the theme, which the festival's Web site (2007.newformsfestival.com/) describes as "encompassing a wide variety of artistic and intellectual practices including, but not limited to, sampling, collage, remixing, and appropriation". And few of the event's many contributors will be more provocative in their use of recycled materials than sculptor and sound artist Ujino Muneteru, who kicks off the festival's 10-day run with a performance next Thursday (September 6) at the Western Front.

The Tokyo-based Muneteru came to the attention of the international art world with his Love Arms: wearable constructions in phallic form that mixed mod-scooter-style chrome work with flashing lights and sound generators. One version featured a pear-shaped disco ball at the end of its metre-long shaft; it must have presented quite a spectacle when Muneteru strapped it to his wiry frame and strode around a nightclub or an art-gallery stage.

His new project, The Rotators, is less flashy, at least on the visual level: it consists of several motor-driven noisemakers, including a set of domestic appliances and power tools a blender, a hair dryer, a drill, a food processor switched on and off by a modified turntable that's part mixing board, part old-fashioned music box.

"I'm not a musician," Muneteru cautions, reached by telephone at the Western Front. He's just flown in to Vancouver, and his halting English is made even more terse by the effects of jet lag. Still, he's quite emphatic about his intent. "I'm an artist and a craftsman," he goes on to explain, "and [with The Rotators] I just wanted to make a drum machine a handmade drum machine. I like 1980s Prince drum-machine sounds."

That's just one indication that his performance is going to be anything but meditative: "I use amplifiers like a rock band," he says. "I want a very punchy, heavy kick sound, like a dance-music party."

Nonetheless, his work is rooted in the artistic traditions of the futurist, Dadaist, and Fluxus movements, as well as in the punk and new-wave music Muneteru absorbed as a teenager in the late 1970s. And there are philosophical inclinations to it as well. The circular patterns of his sound sculptures which include a half-full Coca-Cola bottle that sloshes around and around on top of the rotors of an upside-down buffing machine allude to the loops that feature in much contemporary electronic music, as well as to much larger forces. "When I see the magnetic movement of motors," he explains, "I imagine the movement of the earth or the planets if I'm feeling poetic."

Those interested in the more practical dimensions of Muneteru's work are invited to attend a free instrument-building workshop at the Western Front on Wednesday (September 5); to register, write newmusicadmin@front.bc.ca. But he's not the only New Forms participant willing to offer hands-on advice about low-tech music-making: former Vancouverite Daniel Gardner has already flown in from his Berlin home, and is more than happy to talk about the do-it-yourself aesthetic that informs his work as a DJ, remix artist, and electronic performer.

"I've held seminars and symposiums on the DIY stuff at festivals and so many young kids come in and they're like, 'What software are you using?'" Gardner reports. "And I just say, 'Forget about it, man! Just take the tools that you have like a microphone and a Walkman, or something like that and use your environment.'

"That's the main idea of DIY, for me. A lot of people think it's about building your own electronics or something like that, but it's really just about making music with whatever you have at your disposal."

In his own work, mostly under the Frivolous moniker, Gardner takes that notion further: his post-microhouse soundscapes draw on his early piano studies, his father's love of bluegrass music, and even half-remembered songs from his early childhood. He may be, for instance, the only electronic-music producer to reference Canadian children's entertainer Raffi: Frivolous's recently released Midnight Black Indulgence ends with a bizarrely respectful cover of the latter's "You Gotta Sing". And, like Muneteru, he enjoys building his own mutant instruments, like the Frivolous Patented Electromagnetic Knife, which will feature in his New Forms appearance as part of Manglification, at Open Studios on September 15.

Gardner explains that the idea of wiring a chef's knife to a piezo pickup came to him when he was considering a now-aborted project that was to examine the similarities between cooking and electronic-music production. (Matthew Herbert beat him to the punch, Gardner notes wryly, with his Plat du Jour CD.) But the device is also a way to inject an element of danger both sonic and physical into an art form that is notoriously lacking in on-stage impact.

"The knife is extremely dangerous," he says, laughing. "It's the most unstable instrument that you could ever play. I run it through a delay/looper machine, and if you set the delay time a little bit too high it just kind of screams at you and then it's running through all these resonators that add harmonics to the screaming. If you're not careful with that knife, people actually cover their ears and run for the exits."

So don't say you haven't been warned: if you're looking for the cutting edge, it's here.