I step inside The Sixth Gallery in Parkdale and I'm greeted by the sinister glints of metallic robot eyes staring me down. They're surrounded by a series of surreal musical instruments, constructed with things like bike chains, circuit boards, sockets, and surly looking saw blades. They are the kinds of instruments, with names like 'The Bowafridgeaphone,' that would look as natural in a spastic cyborg's hands, as Lucille does in B.B.'s.
Suddenly, Iner Souster, the master of this bizarre universe, pokes his head up. He was deep in concentration, on all fours in the middle of the floor, sifting through dozens of seemingly disconnected odds and ends --- buttons, screws, spoons, keys and bolts - all spilled out around him as he conducts his peculiar brand of artistic sorcery.
Most of us would look down and see a miserable mess, but Souster sees a budding work of art. He hasn't figured out what it will be yet, but he's in the preliminary stages, where his vision slowly finds a phantasmical form, one piece at time.
"I always have a bunch of different instruments or robots in my head that I want to build and I'm just waiting for that right moment," he notes, looking up at me with childlike exuberance. "The robots and the instruments are always free form, I have the idea in my head, but if you get stuck on that you miss out on it evolving on its own."
Souster's gallery has only been opened for a few months, but he's spent most of his life creating art in one form or another.
"I've always been constructing weird things, I grew up working in the trades, my father was a tradesmen, and I was 12 when I started working with him in the summers just painting and stuff, but he always had a garage full of junk...and I'd spend every free moment in there just putting things together, and actually at that time just taking things apart and destroying them."
To make ends meet Souster worked construction for several years. He made the most of the experience, and admittedly uses tactics he learned in the trade to bolster his creations.
“I realized that a lot of the tools were the same and a lot of the techniques were the same, so why not just take all that information and combine them?”
“On my lunch breaks I would be whittling weird things and piecing weird things together, and being mocked by my co-workers,” he jokes.
Despite his early inclinations towards sculpture, Souster admits his evolution as an artist came slowly, and after much trial and error.
“I have been making instruments and robots since I was a kid but I sort of abandoned that years ago and I got more into painting and I got really into photography for years and illustration,” he explains. “I guess when I started doing the instruments around 2000 I had been working with sculptures and kind of stumbled across a weird piece I was making with an old speaker that I plugged in with a microphone and an amazing sound came out of it.
“I just switched gears immediately and I started getting into full time building instruments, just using junk and not trying to build guitars or anything like that, but just really weird things, I got really unique sounds that you wouldn’t hear anywhere.” 
Over the next several years Souster would create dozens of instruments, some which gained worldwide attention in the subculture of junkstraments. At the same time he started making the robots which adorn his studio like otherworldly watchdogs.
“After about 6 years I found I had all this leftover material that didn’t work well in instruments and I started piecing together these robots…and that’s kind of where the robot thing came in. The first show I made with robots I sold them all and it was crazy. They all went and everybody loved them, so I’ve been doing robots and instruments ever since.”
What he didn’t know at the time was that his instruments, which initially had more aesthetic as opposed to functional purposes, would soon spark a whole new creative fire.
Enter The Fembots
Iner Souster has been friends with the members of the Fembots since he was in high school, and he’s always played a creative role in their musical existence. He toured with the band extensively over the years, shooting promotional photos and video. But it wasn’t long before he found himself on stage, and in the studio, as a member of the group, bringing along his junkstruments to forge new unique sounds that were highlighted on their album Calling Out.
“We’ve just been friends for years and I was always trying to find a way to combine my art with their music and once I started building the instruments that’s when it really took off.”
The experiment also revealed some of the unique challenges that playing with instruments made from junk can present.
“When I first started building them they were just supposed to be wall pieces,” admits Souster. “And then I started getting together with musicians and doing weekly jams…I was just adding sort of ambient soundscapes and sound effects with real musicians adding music to it."
“Then when I started working on the album with the Fembots we were getting some amazing sounds out of things…But the problem we found with doing that is it could never really be recreated the same way again.”
That meant he had to tweak several of the junstruments, making them easier to play, and tune.
“As opposed to the noise and experimental music I was doing before we are now playing structured music. And that’s part of the evolution of building these things, is me learning to play them as well.”
The FemBots are jamming out in the Sixth Gallery. They tune up with wrenches and screwdrivers and jump into it head first. Like any improvised music, it has its moments, sometimes hitting infectious electro-African type grooves, and sometimes falling apart and straying off course. But there’s no doubt they’re having fun. For Souster, making music with his old friends is the culmination of a vision --- one he intends to take even further.
“For years I’ve been trying to combine these things I do,” he admits. “This is what I’ve been doing for the first 38 years and this is what I want to do for the next 38. I come to work every day and I love it."
In the meantime, he’s become an admirable example of how to make use of society’s excesses, although he admits he didn’t set out to be a Green pioneer.
“95 percent of what I use is recycled material...there’s tons of stuff on the street that I just go out and find and it’s gold, it’s everywhere, people are just throwing it out.
“I don’t think when I initially started this I was that environmentally conscious about it, it was just free material but over the years the amount of things that I’ve brought back and recycled, I think that’s great, that’s reduced a lot of landfill, it’s just a lot of waste.”
