Adventures with the Vocoder
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There is a primordial glee that comes with donning a mask and pretending like you’re Frederick Douglass, or a flapper, or Spider-Man – anyone but yourself. But to alter one’s voice – this is a more subtle delight. You probably recognize the sound of the vocoder, even if you’ve never heard the name. The vocoder is a speech synthesis system that changes the human voice into a robotic purr, allowing users to disguise themselves behind a metallic, future-signifying sheen. Nowadays, the concept is a familiar one: The vocoder is often confused with the talkbox and autotune, two comparatively recent versions of the same idea. But as writer Dave Tompkins recounts in his new book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, its history is a unique, unlikely and surprisingly complex one. An imaginatively written and lovingly constructed book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach traces the vocoder’s origins in the 1920s as an instrument for transoceanic communication to its use in World War II-era cryptography, complete with cameos from Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. For the lab coats fiddling around behind the blast doors, the vocoder was a way to split, scramble, and throw the human voice across great distances.
Somehow, the vocoder went from intelligence community hobby horse to music production novelty. Tompkins traces its journey through 1970s Krautrock, the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, Neil Young‘s mountain ranch, Sun Ra‘s scrapped “Outer Visual Communicator” (currently languishing in a swamp in suburban Boston) and of course Afrika Bambaataa, 1980s electro and Miami Bass. The common thread? Everyone who came across the vocoder, from Russian dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to rock stalwart Peter Frampton, was entranced by the possibilities of twisting their voice into something strange and unrecognizable.
After years of intense research, How to Wreck was published in March to great acclaim, and in late May, Dave and New York DJ Monk-One uploaded a mix of vocoder favorites.
Much like other once-exotic and now-commonplace technologies like the Moog synthesizer, the earliest vocoder adherents were electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Bruce Haack who searched, almost pathologically, for new sonic textures. While Carlos’s use of the vocoder in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange is probably the most memorable of these early experiments, Haack’s 1970 concept album The Electric Lucifer captures the vocoder’s capacity to feel both richly sensual and chillingly inhuman. Haack used any new gadget he could get his hands on to help communicate the thrilling play of good and bad, light and dark, war and peace that is Lucifer‘s message. “Haack’s ‘Farad ‘(a prototype vocoder Haack hacked for Lucifer) is another vocoder that schematically isn’t a vocoder, but sounds like a vocoder, so it must be a vocoder,” Tompkins remarks.
Throughout the 1970s, as rock music grew more ambitious in sound, scale and album length, synthesizers became an indispensable weapon in any self-respecting prog outfit’s 18-wheel truck-sized arsenal. There’s no more famous example than Electric Light Orchestra‘s pristine 1978 single “Mr. Blue Sky,” an irrepressible pop core ornamented with a vocoded middle break and an unexplainable, change-of-pace outro solo. “ELO ran everything through the vocoder,” Tompkins explains. “They used an EMS, similar to what Pink Floyd used for Animals. I never appreciated them until hearing ‘Twilight’/'Yours Truly ‘while checking out a wall of Tohl Narita’s ‘Ultraman ‘sketches at the Little Boy exhibit. It made sense then. ‘Blue Sky ‘is so above the clouds, but kind of wan too. It reminds me of this old Heinrich Hoffman cautionary tale called ‘Johnny Look in the Air.’”
As the vocoder became an increasingly recognizable sound in music, film and television, it began to initiate a new generation of devotees, foremost among them the disco and hip-hop producers of the 1970s and 80s. “Man Parrish allegedly bought ELO’s old EMS vocoder,” Tompkins says, and with its collision of intense specificity (at a Sam Ash downtown) and coincidence (of all buyers: electro pioneer Man Parrish?), it sounds like one of the great, suggestive, culture-clash urban legends. But no more so than the strange, vocoded meet-up between the doomsday-warning composer Haack and an enthusiastic young Russell Simmons, a few billions of dollars ago. “I’m still trying to figure out that Bruce Haack-Russell Simmons collaboration ‘Party Machine.’”
There’s probably no less patriotic a vocoder anthem than the unforgettably monikered Gay Cat Park and their 1982 synth-insane Italo-disco single “I am a Vocoder.” “Amazing name,” Tompkins admits. “I know I’m supposed to like this because it has a vocoder in the title.” But the vocoder truly found its ideal users and audience on early 1980s electro tracks like the Jonzun Crew’s “Pack Jam,” a haunting moment of arcade futurism, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “Scorpio,” with its searing, vocoded encouragement, “Show no shame/ Shake it, shake it baby.” Outer space redemption, nuclear apocalypse, tawdry sleaze: The vocoder made everything sound a little more sinister. Fittingly, Miami Bass producers used the vocoder to delirious effect, as on Dynamix II’s ground-hugging “Just Give the DJ a Break” (off Dynamix II The Album). “I like the Visage ‘Pleasure Boys ‘sample on here. And ‘Toilet bowl rock it to the ground – wave those troubles down the drain. ‘The ‘Toilet Bowl ‘was a dance. I don’t think anyone does the ‘Toilet Bowl ‘anymore, but it had its day. Dynamix II has that classic West Palm mini-mall mullet bass, with the ground effects kit.”
If part of the vocoder’s appeal is its weighty, voice-from-beyond presence, then perhaps contemporary gospel tracks like Donald Lawrence and the Tri-City Singers ‘”Oh Peter” (off Bible Stories) are to be expected. After all, who dares pretend that God sounds like a human voice? “Until now, my only encounters with God through the vocoder – besides the day when a box of vocoder books arrived in the mail – was in a song by late ’80s rapper Vandy C.,” Dave recalls. “At the end, the vocoder appears from nowhere to say, ‘Thank you God! ‘I always thought the vocoder would make a good voice of God, with all due respect to Bruce Haack’s amazing ‘Mean Old Devil.’” It’s a return, in a way, to the vocoder’s mystery-shrouded wartime origins: the ultimate, unbreakable code.
