BRUCE HAACK$ – HOOKIN FOR THE HONEY (CARTABIANCA REMIX FT DANIEL SOUS)

ब्रूस HAACK पार्टी मशीन

BRUCE ON RADIO 3 – ITALY

IT’S SPRING NOW…

BRUCE ON NPR

original post

PEANUT BUTTER WULFICER

SIGNAL TO NOISE [REVIEW]

Bruce Haack
Farad: The Electric Voice
Although the first vocoder was patented in 1939 by Bell Labs’ Homer Dudley, it wasn’t until 1970 that the device was introduced to a mass audience by Wendy Carols and Robert Moog on the soundtrack to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Bruce Haack’s vocoder was of his own touch-based design, and he named it ‘Farad’ after 19th-century physicist Michael Faraday. He’s long been a cult hero, but the past several years have seen an official resuscitation of Haack’s music in the form of reissues and compilations; Australia’s Omni Recording Corporation recently released Electric Lucifer (1970/2007) and the previously unissued Haackula (1978/2008) on CD, lovingly remastered and historically framed for posterity. Stones Throw, known for releases by the likes of Madlib, J. Dilla and Dam-Funk, has tossed its hat into the Haack arena with Farad: The Electric Voice, a collection of vocoder-based recordings made between 1970 and 1982. Haack’s music was practically made to be forgotten and rediscovered; catchy yet futuristic in the extreme, it appears now as the template for retro-fetishists like Stereolab and Black Moth Super Rainbow. Farad demonstrates how a device like the vocoder could be used to lend coherence to the most diverse musical material; this striking invention has had a long afterlife in genres that otherwise have little or nothing to do with each other. Like Ken Russell, the British director of Tommy, Haack turned to psychedelia less for its countercultural value than as a medium for his expressive, baroque vision of human life. Electric Lucifer, represented on Farad by three songs, is necessarily a masterpiece of it’s genre, it being the only one of it’s kind: an avant-garde children’s concept album based on the dichotomy of Heaven/Hell and the all-conquering force of Powerlove. Farad also collects three tracks from Electric Lucifer Book II, the unreleased 1979 followup. The selections from Together (1971) are in an entirely different vein, innocuous but enjoyable folk-pop bolstered by the synthetic likeness of acoustic guitar and banjo. Haackula saw the inventor in a darker vein, Bite (1981) was released with cleaned-up versions of it’s often vulgar and cynical lyrics; of these tracks, “Program Me” is by far the most spectacular, a hypnotic hymn to the machine age whose vocal duties are shared by 13-year-old Ed Harvey. The compilation finishes with “Party Machine” (1982), Haack’s proto-hip-hop collaboration with Russell Simmons and a perennial dance favorite. While none of this is new per se, Farad does unearth two singles I was previously unfamiliar with: “Rita” (1975), a fun tune utilizing the simple rhythms and chord progressions of garage rock, and “The King” (1982), a swaggering dirge whose heavy vocoder almost bypasses lyrics entirely to become a pure wash of sound smeared across Haack’s synthetic bass line and drum machine. Even if most of his lyrics remain unintelligible, the composer might remind us that it’s merely the devil who resides in the details. Seth Watter