I am an experience designer and strategist
fostering dialogue between technology and people.
Warm up the robot! Any one of these vintage machines presented in our youtube playlist will transform you (or a loved one) into a Cylon. To start it off, let Giorgio Moroder magically transport you to the wonderful world of vocoders in this Casablanca Records promo video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTxeZ1HDg34
SCHEMATIC: Want more? Check out the entire playlist...
Wait...Who? Don't let the peculiar name distract you from the raw genius of this track. This masterpiece marked the genesis of Italo thoroughbred label Il Discotto Productions in 1982. By the way, you can learn a ton about vintage vocoders by watching our vocoder youtube playlist or checking out our friends over at Matrixsynth. http://youtu.be/qu4NpVvjeQo
SCHEMATIC: More vocoder intel...
Virtually Nothing is known about this Montréal (?) group, but I've deduced what is going on here: Iko was an android trio from the future that traveled back in time to 1982 in order to learn what it meant to be human in the decades just preceding the merger of man and machine. Archetypal and powerful nerd music.
http://youtu.be/sl6cbHCnE98
Only 500 copies of this LP sold. So if you account for DJ/radio promos, maybe 1,000 were even pressed, making this gem truly obscure. The $100+ price tag for this album is one of the deals of the century.
'83 is presented here in its entirety, ripped from my mint copy at 24bit/96kHz and converted to MP3 at 196 kbps for optimal sound quality. I also found and posted two unreleased tracks (9 & 10) for posterity.
SCHEMATIC: MP3s, album review and cover artwork...
Presenting neither a robotic dystopia nor a sci-fi fantasy, instead ‘83 reveals our own robotic inclinations and highlights the struggle of the human soul to escape mechanization. The album envelops its listeners in a blanket of meditative synthesis, instructive beats, poignant lyrics and strangely syncopated accents reminiscent of the abstract music created from DNA sequences.
The coldly humanoid vocals are sung in both French and English. Iko must have spent considerable time in Montréal to pick up that distinctive Quebecois accent in both languages. But then again, their speech recognition and simulation circuitry was probably quite advanced.
Thank you DAX (synthesized harmonies & melodies, voice), U-GEN (triggered & synthesized melodies, voice) and ZAO (computed rhytm & bass, voice), whenever you are.
[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Elevator.mp3|titles=Elevator|artists=Iko]
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[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Gonadotropic_Synthesis.mp3|titles=Gonadotropic Synthesis|artists=Iko]
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[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Subway_49.mp3|titles=Suybway 49|artists=Iko]
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[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Communication_Off.mp3|titles=Communication Off|artists=Iko]
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[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Approach_on_Tokyo.mp3|titles=Approach on Tokyo|artists=Iko]
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[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Digital_Delight.mp3|titles=Digital Delight|artists=Iko]
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[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Model_Type_A.mp3|titles=Model Type A|artists=Iko]
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[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Radioactive_Mist.mp3|titles=Radioactive Mist|artists=Iko]
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[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Military_Service.mp3|titles=Military Service (non-album track)|artists=Iko]
[audio:http://www.innernerd.de/audio/Iko/Iko_Surrender_to_the_Dream.mp3|titles=Surrender to the Dream (non-album track)|artists=Iko]
I recently scored an original 7" pressing of Player Piano from 1982 on Clark Humphrey Records.
To fuel your AV room rock out, all the songs from Player Piano are presented below in their correct order. These videos are also now available on our youtube playlist. Listen to how different the studio and live versions of Meteoright are!
While working with a group of nutters at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s, Derbyshire pioneered loop-based composition by manually recording and piecing together magnetic tape loops and rocking multiple reel-to-reel machines (see below). This brief clip of Derbyshire reel-to-reel beat matching is taken from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop documentary Alchemists of Sound, which can be viewed in its entirety on our Equipment + Theory playlist.
To give you an idea of just how progressive this dame was, this audio clip from the BBC archives reveals the makings of a dense, tasty electro track that predates Kraftwerk's Autobahn by at least four or five years.
Lastly, to demonstrate how all this theory and avant garde technical ability combine to create legendary music, I've included the original Dr. Who TV intro which, although composed by Ron Grainer, sounds so amazing because Derbyshire "realised" it.