On the inner sleeve of Sunlight, there’s a photo of Herbie singing through the vocoder, his mouth somewhat lopsided, struck by an invisible fist of an idea, a fat “Oh shrrrrrrit!” in slow motion, leading some to believe that the vocoder had actually mutated Herbie’s jaw. One imagines that Bob Mitchell wasn’t happy with the Wall-E boogie of “I Thought It Was You” or “Come Running to Me.” In 2000, the refrain of Herbie ghosts would be borrowed and buried by Jay-Dee for Slum Village’s 12 inch “Get Dis Money,” banshees filtered through a pillow, the mattress, the box springs, the floor, heard half-asleep through a summer fan, drifting up through vents from that Dilla bottom. At a D’Angelo show that spring, it went through the rafters of Radio City Music Hall as the band (led by James Poyser and drummer Ahmir Thompson) translated Dilla’s loop into a robed choir and just let the thing vamp from Herbie’s mouth to vocoder to Dilla to Dilla’s machine, then back to church—circuit closed. There but for the grace of band-pass filters.
Fab Five Freddy & Beside, “Change the Beat” (1984, Celluloid Records). Fab Five Freddy didn’t want anyone to hear him rapping in French. “I flavorized it with how I flowed it.” (illustration credit 10.13)
If Bob Mitchell caught Herbie Hancock’s performance of “Rockit” at the 1984 Grammys, he would have seen a troupe of dancing robot pants. Robots smacking each other in the back of the head. Robots trying to get out of bed. Robots doing the Robot. Humans dressed as robots doing the Robot. Bob would’ve fired a beer can at the TV and retreated to a bitter night’s sleep, chased to bed by Vincent Price’s Thriller laugh as Michael Jackson won Album of the Year.
Hancock’s vocoder played a minor role in this operation, a handful of gobbles to make the headset feel wanted. The torn rasp from Grandmixer D. St’s turntable that night would be a different story—the word fresh, a scrape of word, truthfully, more gasp than whisper and dry as mummy mail. The record itself was “Change the Beat,” released on Celluloid Records in 1982 and credited to Beside and Fab Five Freddy, who’d recently been namedropped on Blondie’s “Rapture.” The word became noise and ultimately one of the most germinated sounds in all of music, its likeness propagated by the thousands, one of which was heard on a recent Verizon commercial, supporting data compression in cell phones. D. St, who later changed his name to DXT, influenced hordes of DJs and made a living from this susurration. “That’s why I’m here, I guess,” he says with a weary smile. “I was the first to cut that sound.”
Rarely giving interviews, DXT was as much an inventor as Grandmaster Flash, known to use the vocoder with turntable pedal effects while playing the Exorcist theme, “Tubular Bells,” on a synthesizer. (While most groups encouraged the crowd to throw zodiac signs, DXT’s Infinity Rappers chanted about the synthesizer, letting the nerd into the party.) After the success of “Rockit,” DXT says he kind of went “vocoder crazy,” admitting to doing tons of “nutso underground mysterious demos” and running his turntables through the machine. “Whenever we’d use the turntables, rest assured you were gonna hear the vocoder somewhere around.”
Whenever D.St got the high score in Ms. Pac Man, he entered the initials “THX,” for Robert Duvall’s character in the George Lucas film THX-1138. Coping with the murder of his brother in 1989, he had to reconnect with his drum machine and change his name, a crossroads inspired by Malcolm X and THX’s rebirth at the end of the film, when Duvall climbs out of the underground city and into a beach sunset. (illustration credit 10.14)
According to Bill Laswell, producer of “Change the Beat,” “Fresh” was no more than an impulse at the end of the song, a ghost with a ravaged throat leaving a message at the beep—“This stuff is really fresh”—knowing that without it, the song really wasn’t and so was released into the world as an afterthought. “Fresh” is the only thing remembered about “Change the Beat” (it’s about a detective?) and became its default title. Beside was the nom de whim of Anne Boyle, then the wife of French journalist Bernard Zekri who, along with Jean Karakos, started Celluloid Records, anticipating hip-hop as “the next wave.” (An early release featured Archie Shepp and a sixteen-year-old singer from East Orange named Whitney Houston.) “It was a scene moving very fast,” says Laswell. “You had Basquiat, Rammellzee, Dondi, Futura 2000, Phase 2, Bambaataa.”
Habitually in the right place, Fab Five Freddy agreed to do the Beside 12 inch, in French, but with one stipulation: He didn’t want anyone to hear it. “I didn’t want to play myself. So we worked out the lyrics—it’d be a private detective with a hip-hop flavor. [Bernard] wrote out the story and then [Anne] would write it out in phonetics so I could say it in French. Once I got it then I would flavorize it with how I would flow it. Cool—as long as nobody hears this shit!”
Freddy was then, in his words, “vocoderized.” “It became like a sound unto itself, like an instrument or whatever. It was just a crazy ill sound. The most scratchable joint.” The record Freddy wanted nobody to hear would be heard by everyone, pillaged by DJs and marketing guys, vocoded carbonation from some unvoiced hiss energy drink. Refreshing, soda speak.
The Ahh took on a toothless life of its own. When backwards-masked, it became a reverse sigh, the “disappearance of being in the act of being.” “That weird backward sound is just feedback,” says DXT. “The vocoder is just waiting for sound. So any noise, any distortion, you can talk and it’s gonna resonate those sounds. It’s mutated by the scratch and it didn’t have a melody when that part was being done.”
According to Laswell, “Fresh” was the voice of his de facto manager, Roger Trilling, who happened to be in the studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that evening. “No one would believe it if you told them,” says Laswell. “I don’t think Freddy even knows that.” Earlier that day, Trilling auditioned some Laswell tracks for Bruce Lundvall, then head of Elektra. “Bruce was about as country club as it gets,” says Trilling. “A very Minnesota kind of character. He would put his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head, and if he liked the song, he’d say, ‘This stuff is really fresh.’ ” Later that night at the studio, delirious and ready to go home, Trilling would quote Lundvall through the vocoder. “[Bruce] didn’t know that fresh was in hip-hop currency at the time. I don’t even think we thought of it that way, either.” One of the most cloned hip-hop noises was but an imitation itself, mistaken for someone else in disguise, imitating the imitator on the A-side but replicated by machine. Just some late-night filler. A way out of the studio. Or just home.
Roger Trilling, below, said the word fresh through the vocoder while imitating a white-bearded record exec from Minneapolis. Which kind of blew the author’s mind. (illustration credit 10.15)
“I’d like to say I’m the master of all time and space,” says Trilling. “But that’s just me imitating the whitest of all record executives.”
On September 9, 1943, Bell Labs employee W.E. Widden circulated a classified memo describing the physical constants of a turntable used for SIGSALY. They were (a) moment of inertia, (b) running friction, (c) transient of speed characteristic, and (d) torque-versus-displacement characteristics both with and without feedback.
All of this translates to scratching records on hallucinogens if you’re Luis Quintanilla, who spends most of his time as DJ Disk. When I last saw Disk, he had a grocery bag over his head with horns and called himself the Shigger Fragger, something he accidentally mumbled one day, unaware yet pleased to later discover he’d named himself after the act of grenading a superior officer. Disk and a DJ named Q-Bert spent most of 1995 on acid, trying to cut the vocoder sound from “Change the Beat”—fresh, ah, and every flashing color between—as fast as ball-trippingly possible. “It actually kind of worked,” Disk says, on the phone from his house near Berkeley, California. “We take acid, drink OJ and eat Subway sandwiches. And then scratch at two hundred beats per minute. Non-stop for eighteen hours. Subways, two hundred bpms and acid. That’s it.”
Disk calls “Fresh” the perfect freak accident. In 1997, Bill Laswell would end up be
queathing the vocoder used on “Change the Beat” (a Roland SVC-350, Buy It Now! eBay! $1,200) to Disk. “It was my dream. I finally had the machine that made that sound. Who in their fucking mind would think I would ever have this? I freaked out.”
Disk wouldn’t let it out of his sight. That night, the vocoder sat with him and Laswell at a Korean barbecue restaurant in Manhattan. He held onto it through airport security at La Guardia. During the flight back to California, the vocoder sat next to him on the plane. Nobody was allowed to touch it. Yet the day we speak, Disk waits for the vocoder to be shipped from his studio in Los Angeles. This is the only time they’ve been separated. “It’s on its way,” he said. “I can’t wait. I’m like a parent. All anxious.”
The Shigger Fragger listens for the door. “Where is it?”
TO THE CRAZY AUNT FUTURE
During a 1983 performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Laurie Anderson stood onstage running down tongues: English, Polish, Spanish, Yiddish, Swedish, lingering on the unvoiced sibilance, as if shushing a child. No vibration, just wind and teeth. A home phone towered on the screen behind her, its pinholes too threatening for conversation. Somewhere between English and Russian, the phone was replaced by a scattering of Bell telephone logos. Then a question mark haunted by the dim shape of an airliner. With Finnish, a language cheated out of sunlight, the screen goes black.
That same night, Anderson performed her 1981 hit “O Superman,” the most un-Pop thing on the British pop charts, its beat literally spoken for by a syncopated ah, a hookless phone crying for its receiver, far more soothing than a nasally-inflamed busy signal. The index finger had moved from puckered lips to a naughty wag in a holding pattern, a gentle reprimand for a cookie thief.
Much of the song takes place on an answering machine imagined, a disembodied voice addressing a room that was less empty than just withholding presence. A future in waiting. The vocoder wasn’t in space freaking freaks or doing rails at Studio 54. It was in your home when you weren’t there, a mother warning about the planes.
On the evening of September 11, 2001, Anderson performed “O Superman” in Chicago. The planes had come, the towers fell, and loved ones couldn’t be reached. Speech compression was choked in cell phone panic. (The fear in “O Superman” would take flight in another Anderson track, “From the Air,” in which the vocoder creates not speech but a loose uh-oh on the run.)
“O Superman” takes comfort’s last stand as being the first vocoder song to just say, “Hi, Mom.” Anderson would point out that the “hello” hand signal shares the same wave as “goodbye,” especially to one not acquainted with earthbound oxymoron. It’s up to the voice. During the performance at BAM, Anderson would use a vocoder for the William S. Burroughs tribute, “Language Is A Virus,” anticipating information as a commodity, to be compressed. The screen behind Anderson posed a question that already had its answer. “Can you invade our scrambler system?”
Anderson’s hit stands out in the vocoder space helmet party of the Eighties. Three of the most important vocoder songs are by women: “O Superman,” Wendy Carlos’ version of Beethoven’s Ninth and Cher’s monster hit “Believe.” Cher’s producers claimed the effect was a vocoder—a decoy to conceal Auto-Tune’s identity. With its pitch/bitch issues, the vocoder’s “frequency discriminator” (a Bell Labs term) failed to recognize higher female voices. The machine’s errant pitch condition turned Eisenhower’s wife, for example, into an octogeneric stranger. “Who is this, really?” Ike wondered, his question echoed by Laurie’s words in “O Superman.”
DJ Disk, the Shigger Fragger, photographed in 2009 with the original Roland SVC-350 Vocoder used on “Change the Beat.” Along with Mix Master Mike, Q-Bert and Short Kut, Disk was part of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz. (illustration credit 10.16)
As a high-ranking British officer leading a double life, Alan Turing had to inhabit more than one persona to get access to SIGSALY, Bell Labs’ most veiled project, in a place where suppression was understood and embraced. During the war, Turing’s ideas of artificial intelligence were supported by the military’s prosthetic extensions, the fatal reach of its branches of technology, what “O Superman” called “the hand that takes.” What Alan Turing would have made of these Laurie Andersons in a vocoder—arms, petrochemical, electronic and military—as if false security and comfort were indivisible. Let us embrace? Had Alan Turing not been driven to eat a cyanide apple in June 1954 after being forced into hormone therapy to “cure” his homosexuality, he may have heard “O Superman” on the radio in England, himself in need of a crazy aunt with a kind ear.
Laurie Anderson once told me her goal as an artist was to be able to jump out of her own life, the vocoder being just one way out. “I want to feel empathy and be able to go to another person’s position. It’s my goal as a person as well.” When we met for an interview in 2005, she was subaudible with a mug of tea, recovering from a cold. “With vocoders I like being able to be a little bit removed. It’s like a French farce. You can be the governess, the crazy aunt. I didn’t have to always be myself, which can be pretty tiring.”
Four years prior, I’d spoken to Anderson on the phone, a cold call after receiving the number through a friend. She answered, or rather clicked over. “The vocoder software of today can’t come anywhere close to the analog sound of the old ones. There’s no comparison. No warmth.” She politely said she was living in the future, thanks for calling. Two years later, she became the first and only vocoder to have an artist residency at NASA. Into the crazy aunt future she went.
Laurie Anderson’s surprising vocoder hit “O Superman” reached Number 2 in England when it was released in 1981. Less of a mask than a vocoder duet, “O Superman” was driven by a voice sampling keyboard called the Emulator, another device of early electro, used by Art of Noise, Freeze and Martin Dupont. (illustration credit 10.17)
GRANDMIXER PORTABLE HAIL MACHINE
I’m terribly well known for my voice and I don’t want to have that voice … because I’d still be Vincent Price.
— Vincent Price
In 1977, I sat in a small theater watching Vincent Price do an Oscar Wilde stage monologue called Diversions and Delights, a birthday surprise from my mother. (First stay-up-late memory: watching House of Wax with her when I was six, with Charles Bronson as a deaf mute in his first screen role.) Until then my only experience with Oscar Wilde was a third-grade production of “The Selfish Giant,” in which I played a tree that sang Cat Stevens. Bored because Price wasn’t onstage burning witches, I slept through what critics regarded as the performance of his career. Afterward I got an autograph and shook his gaunt hand. I couldn’t speak, thinking of The Tingler, when Price injected a deaf mute—and himself—with LSD. So I made teeth and fled to the bathroom, sick with excitement. I missed the chance to ask about The Abominable Dr. Phibes, a film in which Price spoke through an artificial larynx that plugged into a golden phonograph on wheels. So many questions. What became of Phibes’ Vincent Price mask? Did he normally leave his face hanging on the phone cradle next to his customized Wurlitzer with orange Lucite pipes? How did Phibes not short himself out when taking slugs of Moët through the speaker jack in his neck? Why didn’t Phibes’ robot jazz band, the Clockwork Wizards, defend his house with tommy guns (as originally planned)?
I showed Grandmixer DXT a photo of Phibes speaking through the phonograph, hoping for some insight. He leaned back and smiled. “Ahh … Dr. Phibes! We meet again.” At age thirteen, DXT caught the Phibes double feature at the Melba Movie Theater in the Bronx. In 1929, Phibes had been nearly barbecued in a car crash while rushing to the hospital to see his wife Victoria dying on the operating table. Like any devoted husband, Phibes blames the surgical team, disinters the body and transfers it to a music conservatory in London. Mad with grief, Phibes consults the Bible for revenge, using the Curses of the Pharaohs to dispose of each doctor, each murder more ingenious and more absurd than the next. (One doctor gets iced by a Portable Hail Machine in the
backseat of a Rolls-Royce.) According to writer John Parnum, Phibes’ sense of humor was as “black as the insides of a buzzard’s bowels.” Tragedy and disfigurement become the motherless mothers of all invention.
“Can you make it say ‘From Dr. Phibes’?” Vincent Price autograph, acquired in 1977 when the author saw his performance as Oscar Wilde in the Jeff Gay production of “Diversions and Delights.” (illustration credit 10.18)
Along with old-school vets like Afrika Bambaataa and Rammellzee, DXT regards Dr. Phibes as a vocoder prototype. Bambaataa goes so far as to call Vincent Price a vocoder. Rammellzee says Vincent Price “is good for the culture” while being impressed with Phibes’ Portable Hail Machine (“That’s good engineering”). DXT was under the impression that Price was still alive:
If Christopher Lee is out there still kicking and fighting Yoda … Phibes had the original voice box. He couldn’t even move his mouth. It was really Dr. Vibes. But they figured it wouldn’t work, so they had to make him Dr. Phibes. That old-fashioned turntable gimmick he had, with the headphone jack in his neck. He was already plugged in. He had MIDI before anybody. His whole shit was about sound. When he was planning, he was listening to music, thinking.
Vincent Price, starring in the 1971 horror film The Abominable Dr. Phibes, speaks through a modulated artificial larynx plugged into a phonograph. “As you see and can hear, I have used my knowledge of music and acoustics to re-create my voice!” Bambaataa and D. St. consider Price/Phibes to be a vocoder prototype. (illustration credit 10.19)
“I’ll be goddamned if Vincent Price isn’t listening to his larynx in stereo!” said one friend, who at age eleven broke into the Wurlitzer factory using a hatchet. “Dr. Phibes’ organ skills were ridiculous,” says DXT. “Man, Phibes was creative. I’m calling George and Bootsy now. We’re going to do Dr. Phibes Redux. Phiberpunk!”
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