How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  Then this fantastic reaction happened.” Ten days later, after an outpouring of holy shits and grails, skeptical bahs and doomed irrational budgeting plans, the Musicoder finally sold for $12,500 to Daniel Miller, CEO of Mute Records and discoverer of Depeche Mode.

  Florian Schneider (far right) picks up Werner Meyer-Eppler’s unfinished 30-band vocoder filter bank in the basement of Bonn’s Institute for Phonetics in 2002. With the help of Kraftwerk engineer Sebastian Niessen, Meyer-Eppler’s “wish list” of frequencies was transferred to a computer to create what Florian calls “the Mother of All Vocoders,” fifty years in the making. (Courtesy Florian Schneider and Sebastian Niessen) (illustration credit 8.22)

  At the time, Schneider had been wandering eBay buying old cinema loudspeakers from the Thirties. “Then I had this wonderful money … hmm … what can we do with that?” After the Musicoder sold, a friend alerted Schneider to the existence of an old filter bank stashed beneath a nineteenth-century observatory at the University of Bonn. “He told me where it was located—in Bonn. Down in the catacombs, in this cellar, was this institute. The Institute for Phonetics and Information Theory. Then my alarm bell was ringing very loudly. You understand?”

  The filter bank belonged to Werner Meyer-Eppler, who had died in 1960 from kidney failure. “In all of the literature you never heard that he actually was trying to build a vocoder,” says Schneider. “This was an unfinished project because this man died pretty early. He put all this work into it and died over that project. Must’ve cost a lot of money to construct that system. It was sleeping there for fifty years or so.”

  Florian then drove to Bonn and put his eBay money down for Meyer-Eppler’s unfinished vocoder. His account:

  This old engineer was there, looking a bit sad because these things were going. I told him they would be in good hands and that I am an admirer of Meyer-Eppler. This vocoder has a tremendous clear wonderful sound. The ghost of Meyer-Eppler, the co-founder of the electronic music studios in Cologne, is in there. Pretty amazing. I know what I have. The mother of all vocoders. These people who invent all this stuff—they must be crazy. Not many of them die in a natural way. They end up in a mental hospital.

  In the late Seventies, a Bavarian hospital commissioned EMS-Germany to provide vocoder recordings for sleeping patients, in particular “heavy cases of mental illness.” These talking water drops, whispers and wind sounds were used for subconscious autosuggestion, generic back-rubs like “Relax and sleep,” and “It’ll be okay.” Perhaps this is what Dr. Meyer-Eppler meant by “simulation of pathological features through channel transposition.” Either way, the vocoder had entered the dreams of the insane through a leaky faucet.

  I mentioned this to Laurie Anderson during an interview, asking if she ever dreamed in vocoder. “No,” she said. “But that would be fun.” She did admit to being serenaded by a quartet of headless squirrels. “Actually,” she said, “it was music disguised as screaming.”

  Cyclist has mind completely blown by the vocoder. Ad for EMS-Germany, the company which also recorded a talking water drop demo for a Bavarian mental institution to be played while patients slept. (Courtesy EMS) (illustration credit 8.23)

  MOON, HI

  The ghosts you are waking, they are in a coffin shop in Cologne called Schmitronic, among the vintage microphones, mixing consoles, obsolete turntables and the occasional lost vocoder. “They called him ‘Dead Body Schmit’ or ‘Cadaver Smith,’ ” says Schneider, a customer in the early Eighties. “You had to go past the coffins down into the cellar where he has all this used radio and studio equipment. Always complaining and moaning around. I bought many good things.”

  I’d first heard of Schmitronic through Holger Czukay, the German tape splicer and bassist from Can. “He was an undertaker,” he whispers in a scuttle, a lantern held to a grin. “Mr. Schmit had lots of studio equipment that the WDR radio station threw out. The quality of them was Rolls-Royce. You could use it for the next hundred years without sounding old-fashioned—especially if everything comes to tape machines. I bought a Fifties IBM Dictaphone from the undertaker. It was meant for the secretary, but I was able to make tape loops.”

  Inner Space Studios in Cologne drooled tape loops from the rafters as Holger tried to edit some sense into Can’s epic recording sessions. Czukay once said sampling was invented when Spike Jones recorded a dog barking “Jingle Bells.” “Voices became interesting to me by the living atmosphere that they had,” he says. “Everything was fascinating beyond natural. When something was going to become artificial, I wanted to know what it was. [With Can] we always were trying to get away from the natural voice.”

  Can couldn’t seem to get far enough away, as if it were a race between losing their voices and their minds. Malcolm Mooney heard a train whistling outside his door and treated his larynx like the Wolfman’s welcome mat. Damo Suzuki was famously hired after being spotted head-butting the sun in the middle of a street in Munich. Then there was Irmin Schmidt, the keyboard player who flat couldn’t sing. “The only way Irmin could survive was to make something as artificial as possible,” says Holger. So Irmin turned to the ring modulator, popular among the Daleks of Dr. Who. On Can’s “Come Sta, La Luna”—named after da Vinci’s moon greeting—Schmidt is an amiable old fishwoman. He calls it a sorcery thing. A friend from Munich heard the song and said he went to Mars and came back on a stretcher.

  “If I could only remember what I did with my voice!” Schmidt says, on the phone from Germany with a sore throat. “The song was about a tightrope dancer in outer space who falls for a magic woman who walks through walls, and all kinds of strange things. Unfortunately, the relationship does not work out. It was not meant to be totally understood anyway. It’s altered so much with effects. I don’t understand it any more.”

  FREAKING REAL TO THE TRUE

  Felix Visser once told me that our voices originate in the wind. His Syntovox 221 Vocoder was designed in 1977 and drew clients like ELO, Tangerine Dream and Wendy Carlos. Forced to take piano lessons as a child, the Dutch-born Visser empathized with “Sparky’s Magic Piano.” He was also a “bombing foreteller”: “I would sit up in bed, long before the planes were near, and stick my finger up in the air, saying, ‘Vlieger komt!’ (‘Flyer comes!’) And I was always right—not ESP, but rather sensitive to VLF.” The Syntovox was used to successfully clone the voice of Joseph Luns, secretary general of NATO. “Freaking real to the true,” says Visser.

  REACTING EXTREMELY ON SOFT NOISY THINGS

  In 1981, Holger Czukay recorded a twenty-minute vocoder song about perfume, based on the space station of his childhood and inspired by his wife U-She’s kitchen perfume laboratory. “I’m just listening now to the vocoder in my imagination,” U-She says. “Lots of differentiated transparent things. This fragility makes it the likeness of perfume. [The vocoder] has a lot of floating things in it. It’s very unreal. After the rain, the air gets misty. That goes along very good with the ghosts.”

  “Ode to Perfume” seems to be in pain, like a cat scraped off someone’s white walls, on a stretcher and mewling for painkillers. “Actually [Ode] doesn’t sound at all like a vocoder,” says Holger. “You wouldn’t recognize it as robot. Deceptive. I know that robot voice—it was very elementary. ‘Ode to Perfume’ was a far more musical-dominated thing.”

  Holger Czukay, On the Way To the Peak of Normal (1981, Philips). Holger Czukay’s “Ode to Perfume” was inspired by the perfume experiments of his wife U-She and those of Brian Eno. In an interview with Lester Bangs in 1979, Eno said, “The Voice of Reason is another voice of indeterminate quality, indeterminate humanity, ready, into confusion, after which the men’s syllables start becoming scrambled. I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.” (illustration credit 8.24)

  On side one of Holger’s album On the Way to the Peak of Normal, “Ode to Perfume” yaws past steer skulls, those grinning eggshells, waving at dead motels and filling stations
, by and by, at a rocking-chair clip. Heard in Lynne Ramsay’s 2001 film Morvern Callar, “Ode” is Samantha Morton drifting through the couch-melt ends of a party, all filtered through the memory of a dead boyfriend’s mix tape. “The whole [song] was pretty sophisticated,” says Holger. “But it shouldn’t become pretentious-sophisticated.” There’s a fine line between sophisticated and smelling funny. When Holger was finishing “Ode to Perfume,” the vocoder was the final element, modulating his voice with the synth, as if it were Poncelet’s aromatic pipe organ, from Appalachian sassafras (which smells like Froot Loops) to Catholic Church warmed over:

  I was still missing something [in the song] and it was in fact the perfume. The vocoder was the perfume. It was reacting extremely on soft noisy things, like breathing. The flow of air becomes as important as the creation of the tone. To use the vocoder is complicated. You have to dedicate yourself one hundred percent. I had to be extremely reduced in the emotions because if you get a bit too far, the vocoder is punishing you by bad results. Or just ordinary. There is a disturbing factor nonetheless. Suddenly you become something that wasn’t any more perfume. Something that smelled bad. Something that was destroying the atmosphere.

  Effluvia, such a pretty word for drop-dead noxious. Vocoders and noses go together like code and cold. When a human impersonates a vocoder, the nose shrugs and we become hypochondriacs. The ears tell the brain that the voice has caught a cold and the brain goes along with it, the gullible kid brother.

  SO THEY TOOK ME AWAY

  With respect to John Cage, the Mellotron and Marley Marl, the invention of sampling can be a personal choice. It could’ve been Sister Sledge doing RUN-DMC in The Jeffersons’ living room. Or it could’ve been Supertramp, when they used the double-chirp turnover signal from Mattel’s electronic Pro Football II on “The Logical Song.”

  “Ode to Perfume” was recorded in Cologne, in the castle studio of Conny Plank, engineer to Krautrock icons like Kraftwerk, Neu! and Cluster. Plank was known to turn a knob into a road trip, rolling the odometer’s eyes right up into its brain, what writer Julian Cope called “the Moving Fucking Zone Out.” This met the specifications outlined by Czukay in his liner notes for “Ode to Perfume”: “As a boy I dreamt of leading a normal life on a space station … this music was recorded in such a visionary place but without the family of my fantasy.”

  Czukay also suggests rollerskating to “Ode to Perfume.” If skates are not available, he recommends driving, flying or just taking a “a trick-film journey into the elaborate weavings of a Persian carpet.” “Yes! Roller skating! This was the testing of the perfume. How does this music work when you are somewhere, having a journey? On roller skates!”

  One night, Czukay was followed by police while skating through Cologne, listening to his perfume song on a homemade Walkman—a Ziploc bag full of electronics on his hip, wired to explode. “They saw how unsafe I was on these skates and thought, ‘This poor man, we have to protect him.’ I’d go through the city, testing ‘Ode to Perfume.’ The whole life around me—the reality became virtual at that moment. The testing of it was good.”

  MCs for tactical ciphony have existed since before this agency was created.

  — David G. Boak, NSA lecture on Secure Voice, 1971

  Funky, funky, funky contains one word type: ‘Funky.’

  — Manfred Schroeder, Bell Labs

  INVISIBLE MAN GETS IN FOR FREE

  Holger Czukay may be the only man to put on roller skates for a vocoder song about perfume. Most skated to songs about freaks. In 1982, Jive Records sent the rap group Whodini to Conny Plank’s castle to work on their debut album. Two kids from Brooklyn named Jalil and Ecstasy found themselves in Cologne, listening to Can and Ultravox, and hanging with Holger Czukay. “Whodini didn’t have enough magic for me,” Holger sighs. “Somehow I didn’t like them. There were so many people who were going for effect but somehow they lost their souls in the vocoder.”

  In 1984, we were less concerned with the fight for Whodini’s soul than seeing them at the Swatch Watch New York City Fresh Festival, where kids lost their pants to the curfew-breakers “Freaks Come Out at Night” and “Five Minutes of Funk.” I’d stay up all night watching Video Vibrations on BET for a glimpse of “Freaks Come Out at Night,” filmed at the Fresh Fest, just to see Whodini do that special clapapella version of “Friends” in a parking garage. I once saw them hold their green-eyed DJ upside down by the ankles over the turntables, a loan-shark balcony grip, so he could put his mouth on the fader and go bonkers on the first vocoder song to speak Arabic, “Al-Naafiysh,” all of which amounted to getting barraged by the word “time” for thirty seconds.

  MR. MAGIC SWAN

  In 1983, a kid from Nottingham named Ivory X would dress like an “international downhill ski master” and spin on his wallet to “Magic’s Wand” by Whodini, thinking the song was “Mr. Magic Swan,” with no help from the vocoder. Dedicated to the recently deceased hip-hop radio pioneer Mr. Magic, the instrumental of “Magic’s Wand” holds a shimmering instant of vocoder reflux—not a word, but a burp of twilight. (illustration credit 9.1)

  In 2002, I caught up with Whodini in a double-wide in Central Park, part of the backstage area for a Summer Old School Reunion that included Biz Markie, Full Force (then songwriters for *NSync) and Kurtis Blow (now a preacher). Whodini had just performed “Funky Beat,” the only video to feature Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Lon Chaney. Jalil and Ecstasy were both winded from all that running around and remembering. Neither had much to say about Cologne other than “It was a cool idea” and “You’re talking twenty years ago,” back when Whodini wore white suits and white leather shorts.

  The first Conny Plank/Whodini collaboration was “Rap Machine,” too dinky for either party to really acknowledge. “Nasty Lady,” however, was a stone boot crunch, its drum machine suggesting Lurch repeatedly head-butting a door frame, his brain apparently in no hurry to push the duck button. When Whodini asks, “How many of y’all know nasty ladies?” it’s the nasty ladies who answer, screeching on behalf of their men, assuring they’d known no better. Impressive, startling even, is how this screech carries itself across the room with all that back-raking decay. But as Samuel R. Delany once said, “There are times when all the helling and yelling won’t fill the lack.” So Conny Plank treats us/it to a nine-minute dub version.

  Whodini’s “Haunted House of Rock” should have been recorded in a castle, where you learn about a woman named Voodoo-on-a-Stick. She shows up at the party hanging on a dead man’s stolen arm, her hair teased out by some hellion of voltage that cussed darkness. This is the first song equipped with its own “Vocoder Version,” and the first time I put eyeballs on the word. I bring this up to Whodini, back inside the trailer at Central Park, which prompts Jalil and Ecstasy to scrunch up their nostrils and do the “Vocoder Version” hook: “It’s just what you wanted / Something funky and haunted.” I join in because there’s no sense being half-assed about things. Ecstasy’s twin brother Dynasty walks by, pretending not to hear.

  Back out onstage, Biz Markie needs help. He has lost his shirt and the second verse of “Just a Friend.”

  Ecstasy then looks at me with a trace of pity. “Man! You really like that vocoder, don’t you?” I’m pretty sure that’s what he said—at this point Biz’s voice box was being piped in by the crowd, toddlers included. “Oh baby, youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!”

  “The vocoder was just something they had in the studio,” Ecstasy says with a shrug. “Probably the engineer’s idea. We didn’t know what it was, really.”

  Onstage, Biz itches the back of his head with a microphone, pretty satisfied with how it all went down.

  Hashim’s “Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)” (1984, Cutting Records) was the first B-boy vocoder jam to use camera shutters to emulate scratching and say, “It’s time.” Not to be confused with “Time is,” as uttered by Good Man Brazen Face, the artificial talking head built by Friar Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century. (illustration credit 9.2)r />
  TAKE THAT AND PARTY MACHINE

  In 1981, the first rapping vocoder may have come from a “Christmas fanatic” from Nordegg, Canada, who said his only friends were farm animals. One wouldn’t think twice about an electro-funk novelty like “Party Machine” had it not been recorded by Bruce Haack, the homemade synth inventor who released an album called The Electric Lucifer, wrote futuristic square dances for children and appeared on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. That it would appear on an unreleased album called Haackula isn’t as strange as the song being a collaboration with Russell Simmons, the party machine himself, then managing Kurtis Blow. Simmons went on to produce “The Def Jam,” a vocoder 12 inch recorded by Jazzy Jay, an eponymous move to promote their label before LL Cool J did it for them. Yet the B-side, “Cold Chillin’ in the Spot,” received more airplay because it featured Russell Rush, burzooted out of his mind after a night of running his mouth all over town. Meanwhile, Bruce Haack returned to Christmas with the vocoder children’s album Zoot Zoot Zoot, Here Comes Santa in His New Space Suit.

  Jackpine Savage, Together (a participation musical concept album for all children) (1971, Dimension 5 Records). Jackpine Savage was the alter ego of Bruce Haack, creator of the Dermatron (a skin-sensitive oscillator) and children’s synth tracks such as “The Witches’ Vacation.” Haack’s “Mean Old Devil” is the best song about Satan to use a homemade vocoderish device named “Farad.” Farad debuted on “Upside Down” from Haack’s Electronic Record for Children (1969) and appeared on his Jackpine Savage album, Together (1971). (Courtesy Edan) (illustration credit 9.3)

  Any kid worth the pile of broken robots under his bed knew that voice. Maybe from a Transformers cartoon. Or Berzerk, a video game that caused two fatal heart attacks and taunted your Now-and-Later finances with a vocoder (“I hear quarters in those pockets!”) just so you could catch your death from a bouncing smile named Evil Otto. Most likely it was the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica, happily embraced by those unimpressed with C3PO’s fussy accent, too scolding, too parental—too human. The Cylons, with their glowing red wall-eye and silver armor, shining like a lasagna pan licked clean. We wanted the Cylons to laser their names into Lorne Green’s eyebrows, even if they had to use subtitles while doing it. (The vocoder’s lack of intelligibility did not suit Battlestar Galactica’s prime-time slot.) When the Cylons spoke, they threatened to squeak-wipe humanity off the face of TV, in an EMS voice that said “By your command” for 2,500 pounds per unit.