Required reading No.22
How To Wreck A Nice Beach - Dave Tompkins
2011 - Stop Smiling Media, Chicago | Melville House Publishing, Brooklyn
First Paperback Printing
This is a history of the vocoder. A fantastic invention originally intended to encode speech for confidential communication co-opted by the music peeps to make amazing music. Laurie Anderson used it to great effect on ‘O Superman’, a song I fell in absolute love with in 1981.
The title of the book comes from an early attempt at encoding speech with a vocoder. The phrase ‘how to recognise speech’ was translated as ‘how to wreck a nice beach’.
This isn’t the best written book (I feel the writing gets in the way of the story), but it does contain a lot of interesting stuff…
4/21/2024, 8:16:57 PM