Vocode It.
“From what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consequences were those half-articulate thunder croakings drawn?” HP Lovecraft
I have been having my brain freak out for the last couple days because of Random Access Memories. If you haven't, get the fuck on it. Daft Punk is just blowing it out of the stratosphere.
I have been DEEP in the education on the vocoder and talk box, the music-freaking hardware of your dreams (used in EVERYTHING from the voice of the train in “Dumbo” to the beginning of “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath). My study started with the Daft Punk album and my interest in finding out exactly how they managed to record the while thing in analog without any help from computers and make it sound like it flew in from outer space. It grew as I read “How to Wreck a Nice Beach” (what a vocoder will say when you input “How to recognize speech”), and ended on Youtube, where I flipped out. I have compiled some awesome clips and quotations for your perusal.
Pete Drake, who influenced Pete Townshend and has some dope style.
Stevie (need I say more?).
Lester Troutman, the brother of Roger Troutman, the king of the talk box, talking about their first creation, which led to things like this: “I shouldn’t be giving you these secrets, but we took the tube off the deep freeze in the garage, for meat. They had drains on them… we had no money, man! You think we went over to The Guitar Center and said ‘Give me one of those tubes, and, by the way, better call family doctor and see if this stuff is going to give you toxic poisoning?’ You think that when Daniel Boone went from Kentucky to California he hopped on I-40? They had to kill bears! So when you ask, ‘was the tube clean?’ – you want the answer? HELL NO, it wasn’t clean…”
I also wanted to share a piece from Wax Poetics. It references Carl Sagan and space, while touching on shitty Chicago racism veiled in musical hatred, while providing an excellent review of a great album and discussing the scope of disco (which is GREAT if you didn't realize, Exhibit A ):
"When the voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 with the gold-plated copper disc, "The Sounds of Earth," on board, America was hedging its bets. Any extraterrestrial life that Voyager runs across while cruising throughout the universe is free to check out some of the garden-variety world music Carl Sagan put together for them. But I doubt that's what they're really looking for. If NASA had been checking the charts, it'd be Chic and Donna Summer flying throughout space at 40,000 miles an hour right now. By the time "Saturday Night Fever" was released by the end of the year, America's fascination with disco had reached fever pitch. But just 2 years later, embittered Chicago rock DJ Steve Dahl preyed on America's fears of a gay Black planet and capped of his "Disco Sucks" campaign with "Disco Demolition Night," dynamiting thousands of disco records into oblivion. Lots of drunk White boys showed up and showed out, rushing the field after the explosion, and having to be cleared out by cops in riot gear. By the end of the next year, both Studio 54 stalwart Nile Rogers and disco auteur Gino Soccio couldn't sell a record. Soccio peeped game, labels had flooded the market and were ready to cash in their chips. While Nile would go on to reinvent his sound for the '80s, Soccio decided to drop out. The social movement he had witnessed was gone, and with it his career. But while disco may have been declared dead, it only went underground. Just five years later, Dahl's beloved Chi-town would record the first house record, beginning a new ear in dance music. Techno would take root in Detroit, hip-hop in NYC. Out of that hip-hop stew would come Teddy Riley, who got dance floors popping in the '90s with his genre straddling New Jack Swing. But what if we knew then what we know now? What if Chic and Donna Summer were on that Voyager record? And what if two robots brought it back to earth with their ideas of disco and everything that's happened ever since? What would that record sound like? Our guess is something like the new album by Daft Punk, "Random Access Memories." A "Back to the Future-" styled journey into the history of dance music, the album unites generations of collaborators under the common goal of creating a modern dance classic the way they used to. All analog, live musicians, no computers- a risky move considering their status as godfathers of the new Electronic Dance Music movement. Just as English rockers brought the blues back as classic rock, the French have played a big part in bringing back disco, and its consequential underground mutants house and techno, as EDM."
Daft Punk has taken all this education and studied their asses off and made some killer tracks. It’s hard to say which is my favorite on the album, but I love this one.
Happy listening, appreciators.
HP appreciates HP Lovecraft, dudes that research books for decades in order to compile the craziest collection of stories about a slice of music history, and sharing much of the same music taste as his father, who introduced him to Troutman and blew his mind.