PITCHFORK [REVIEW]

Farad: The Electric Voice
[Stones Throw; 2010]
7.1

MP3: Bruce Haack: “Electric to Me Turn”

Reissue releases usually oversell the now-clichéd story of a misunderstood musical genius. Farad, Stones Throw’s retrospective of electronic music eccentric Bruce Haack, does peddle that tale to a certain degree, much like the 2004 documentary Haack: The King of Techno. But the real pleasure of the disc, covering music released during the later part of his career from 1970-82, is that it doesn’t try too hard to define Haack’s compositions and philosophy or spend extensive time wondering, “What if?” It instead exposes the raw components of his odd career, an improbable, colorful circuit board resembling the wiring to some Rube Goldberg device.

A musical prodigy from a Canadian mining town, Haack was all-encompassing in his approach. He had composed far-out children’s music and pop songs, experimented with classical/synthesizer hybrids, and hand-crafted a studio’s worth of electronic instruments (including a proto-vocoder, Farad, named after inventor Michael Faraday) by the end of the 60s. Few can claim to have demoed electronic instruments for Fred Rogers and written a song covered by Beck (“Funky Little Song”, not included on this album). But his scattered biography goes a long way toward explaining the playful weirdness and the philosophical underpinnings that made Haack so refreshing. Even on his psychedelic excursions or the stone cold electro funk of “Stand Up Lazarus”, there’s a sense of wonder and play, and he doesn’t stay perpetually plugged-in, letting folk and country twang find its way into his music.

The tone of his tracks veered from suspended, bubbly escapes (“Rain of Earth”) and silly sing-alongs (“Maybe This Song”) to a Kraftwerk-worthy electro jam with a pre-Def Jam Russell Simmons (1982′s “Party Machine”) or the Byrds-like tinge of “National Anthem to the Moon”, one of a handful of tracks on the comp taken from his 1970 album The Electric Lucifer. Haack took to the vocoder like Jim Henson took to felt, imitating a guttural monster on “Noon Day Sun” and bending his voice into that of a cheesy lovelorn cyborg on “Rita”. On the jaunty, “Electric to Me Turn”, Haack gets philosophical over steam organ synths, declaring, “Electric to me turn this night/ Reflecting universal light/ All I knew that should be true/ Is reality in you.” Hindsight may render some of these tracks a bit silly or indulgent, but this patchwork of music showcases a true believer and a talent that deserves recognition among his early synthesizer peers. Patrick Sisson

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BLURT! (9/10)

Bruce Haack
Farad: The Electric Voice [reissue]
(Stones Throw)

At this day and age in the advent of Auto-Tune and artists as diverse as Thom Yorke, Kanye West and Cher exploring the boundaries of voice modulation, the utilization of the vocoder is as ubiquitous in pop music as actual singing. And the man you can thank (or blame) for bringing robotic crooning to the airwaves is Bruce Haack.

Since 1962, this Canadian-born inventor and musician was pivotal in the implementation of touch pads, synthesizers and rhythmic pulses to recorded sound. He got his start by making educational children’s music, a craft for which he dropped out of Julliard but wound up as a guest on such shows as The Mike Douglas Show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and The Tonight Show. What helped Haack gain notoriety amongst the likes of Madlib, Peanut Butter Wolf and the late J. Dilla, however, was his grown-up material, bookended by his 1970 acid-rock epic Electric Lucifer and his 1981 electro-fied swan song Bite.

And it was through this more esoteric end of Haack’s work that “Farad” came to be, a self-made vocoder that predated Kraftwerk’s Autobahn by several years. Farad: The Electric Voice finally brings to light the genius of this unsung hero of electronic music. Working in conjunction with his estate, this 16-track compilation gathers together songs from his run through the seventies featuring Farad in the cut, including several previously out-of-print and unreleased tracks, including an eight-minute collaboration with a pre-Def Jam Russell Simmons from 1982 called “Party Machine.” Ultimately, this is the definitive overview of a most remarkable man (Haack passed away in 1988) and his extraordinary machines.

DOWNLOAD: “Incantation”, “National Anthem to the Moon”, “Man Kind”, “Snow Job”, “Party Machine” RON HART

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DJ BRUCE HAACK @ DUBLAB

LA TIMES [FEATURE]

The electric madness of Bruce Haack and an exclusive Peanut Butter Wolf remix

November 16, 2010 | 12:18 pm

The late producer J Dilla’s ability to re-oxygenate creaky soul samples is often celebrated as one of his preeminent gifts, but it reflected only a portion of his body of work.

Less analyzed but equally important was the legendary beat maker’s ability to seamlessly infuse the automaton funk and fractured experimentation of electronic music pioneers such as Raymond Scott, Giorgio Moroder and the Belleville Three (Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins).

Even less known was Dilla’s love of vocoder pioneer Bruce Haack, a Julliard-schooled, peyote-ingesting polymath from Alberta, Canada. Largely obscure to mass audiences in his lifetime, Haack’s appearances on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” fostered his reputation as a kooky uncle playing extraterrestrial-sounding synths to dazzled audiences a decade before Kraftwerk.

Like Dilla himself, Haack was an inscrutable shapeshifter impossible to pigeonhole. He spent most of the 1960s and ’70s switching between children’s music, experimental rock operas and acid-rock synth opuses. His collected output runs the gamut from Roald Dahl at his weirdest, Tangerine Dream being covered by Kraftwerk and Devo on strong drugs. Sampled by Cut Chemist and covered by Beck and Stereolab, Haack’s work remains the right kind of weird 22 years after his death.

If no description is more overused than “visionary,” Haack is one of the few artists worthy of the word. Even his swan song, 1982’s “Party Machine,” telescoped toward the future, with Haack collaborating with a young Russell Simmons to create a funky vocoder jam that would probably warp Kanye West’s circuits if he heard it today. The tune is collected with all of Haack’s seminal work on the Stones Throw-released “Farad: The Electric Voice,” a compilation named after his trusted homemade vocoder.

It was executive-produced by Peanut Butter Wolf, who was first exposed to Haack via a road trip with Dilla and Madlib. An instant convert, he’s fittingly remixed Haack’s “Stand Up Lazarus,” a song that references a biblical parable about a man who rises from the grave. Haack isn’t about to escape the cemetery anytime soon, but the stellar “Farad” ensures that his music will get a second lifetime.

– Jeff Weiss

Download: (Pop & Hiss Premiere)\”Stand Up Lazarus\” (Peanut Butter Wolf Remix)

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HAACK DOC PLAYS HOT SPRINGS

Screening of ‘Haack: The King of Techno’
Friday, October 22 · 9:00pm – 10:30pm
Location Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival
Malco Theatre
Hot Springs, AR

After Party: DJ Bruce Haack + special guests. Director Philip Anagnos will be spinning the best of Bruce Haack along with other special guest DJ’s. Low Key Arts 118 Arbor St. 10pm

RECORD COLLECTOR (5 STARS)

Pioneering synth-pop that still cuts the mustard

The diversity of Bruce Haack’s musical output is breathtaking: ranging from jingles for 60s commercials on American TV to Broadway show tunes. He was also a pioneer of electronic music, creating and crafting songs in a home studio with the same dedication and inventiveness that Kraftwerk deployed in Germany.
This collection brings together Haack’s output from the 70s and is a smouldering cigar of invention. The National Anthem Of The Moon – taken from the famed 1970 LP The Electric Lucifer – sounds like a song by Love at their peak and arranged by French pop duo Air. On the other hand, Maybe This Song is electronic Beach Boy perfection. Most of the vocals are either treated with an early vocoder or shyly-applied, which gives tales of visiting aliens, Lazarus and the worderful Rita a real warmth. Party Machine is taken from the 1978 classic Haakula, and its electronic beat, twanging bass and use of space sets a course for hip-hop and modern electronica. Indeed, Haack is some kind of musical godfather to British synth-pop acts such as Human League and Depeche Mode, as these songs all have human blood pumping through their electronic veins.

Stones Throw | STH 2221
Reviewed by Ian Shirley

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FARAD: THE ELECTRIC VOICE [RELEASE]

BRUCE HAACK – FARAD: THE ELECTRIC VOICE

Collected released and unreleased vocoder recordings, 1970-1982, from electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack.

Available now at stonesthrow.com / official release date: October 19

Up until now, the legacy of Bruce Haack (1931-1988) has only existed in the quirks, glitches, and audio signals of modern techno-luminaries such as Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, but unlike the aforementioned, Haack has been relegated to a position of relative obscurity. With Stones Throw’s collection Farad: The Electric Voice, the electronic music pioneer can hopefully be lifted into the spotlight of the Electronic music continuum.

J Dilla would be the one to enlighten us that Haack was something more than a just guest on the Mister Rogers Show. “I first heard Haack’s music through Dilla,” says Stones Throw founder and DJ, Peanut Butter Wolf, recalling a road trip he had taken with both J Dilla and Madlib. Haack had released the electronic-based acid-rock album Electric Lucifer in 1970, a conceptual piece that maps out a war between heaven and hell. “It really threw me off. It was this psychedelic, electronic stuff from the late 60s that sounded so futuristic.”

Haack’s music is rooted in the idea that humans and electronic machines share a reciprocal relationship that manifests itself through sounds. In order to further explore this dynamic, Haack dropped out of Juilliard to pursue a more experimental course in, surprisingly, educational children’s music. He later released material off his own label Dimension 5 Records in 1962, which allowed him to mix kinetic energy, infuse psychedelic philosophy, and pluck sounds from various genres across the board. Haack used homemade synthesizers, proto-vocoders, and the skin-touch sensitive Dermatron to expand his music into a realm of technological creativity.

Farad: The Electric Voice specifically focuses on tracks using Haack’s self-made vocoder, which he named “Farad.” This was the one of the first truly musical vocoders, and first to be used on a pop album, pre-dating Kraftwerk’s Autobahn by several years.

The album includes out of print and un-released tracks accessed though negotiations with Haack’s estate. “We are excited by the thought of working with labels such as Stones Throw to see what happens when their selective audiences discover Bruce,” says Bruce Haack Estate director Philip Anagnos, who also designed this album’s artwork. “The estate is also very fond of the art of remixing and is intrigued by the notion that popular artists such as Kanye West and Thom Yorke may very well be on their way to discovering Haack for the first time.”

Download MP3 – Bruce Haack – Electric To Me Turn (1970)

A collection of remixes has been organized by Peanut Butter Wolf. These will be released as an EP at a later date. Here is 1970′s “Incantation” remixed by Danimals, and a video for 1982′s “Party Machine” remixed by Prince Language.

Download MP3 – Bruce Haack – Incantation (Danimals Remix)

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LOS ANGELES, WED. 9/22: PB WOLF, J ROCC AND … BRUCE HAACK?

To celebrate the release of Bruce Haack’s Farad: The Electric Voice, and Dave Thompkins’ book How to Wreck a Nice Beach about the history of the vocoder, Peanut Butter Wolf, J. Rocc, Dave Tompkins and a dude billed as DJ Bruce Haack will be playing all-vocoder music at The Room in Hollywood on the 22nd. This is free. RSVP to cherryrsvp@walktalkin.com or just show up. Robots not admitted without guardian. 21+.

THE LIST (5 STARS)

Bruce Haack – Farad (The Electric Voice)
Source: The List (Issue 667)
Date: 15 September 2010
Written by: Sean Welsh
(Stones Throw)

Listening to the bizarre, bewitching and above all unique work of ‘lost’ electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack, it’s tempting to trace his influence through Cabaret Voltaire, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and any number of psychedelic electronic futurists. However, it’s hard to say if they had even heard of him, such is the obscurity of his reputation. This compilation, now one of the few places to discover his home-made, otherworldly music, is an indispensable portal into a mind-bending world of proto techno and fried pop. It’s all evidence that the time is long overdue for Haack to take his place beside Joe Meek and Bob Moog as one of the key progenitors of electronic music.

original article

NME (8/10)