Wreck a nice beach

My friend Dave Tompkins recently published his first book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach. The book is a remarkable history of the vocoder, from its invention to its use in WWII to its infiltration of modern music and every remarkable place it has popped up in between.

Dave, who has written for the Wire, the Village Voice and Big Daddy (for whom he wrote a definitive piece on Paul C), tends to pack paragraphs with facts, anecdotes, esoteric trivia, oddball references and jokes until they reach nuclear density. The vocoder, with its previously uncharted connections to apparently, well, everything, is an ideal subject for him. He spent nearly a decade tracking and distilling every trace of the vocoder into a book that's a fascinating history, a flood of funny tangents and really readable.

To promote the book, Dave just let loose a new mix that he put together with assistance from Monk One. It encompasses huge swaths of vocoder music, from electro to ambient to synth-pop, as well as some vocoder ephemera and cameos from vocoder cousins (I see you, talk box and Sonovox!), but it flows smoothly between bookending snatches of Neil Young. You might catch up if you follow the beaches he wrecks [insert BP joke here].


There is a link for the mix and a complete track listing with liner notes here. If you want to skip ahead to streaming or downloading, click here.

Dave also catches a shout in a mix I've been meaning to recommend, Chairman Mao's April outing for Spine Magazine (which, d'oh!, just disappeared from Spine's front page into the ether). If I can get Mao's permission, I'd love to repost the mix here because it's a terrific selection of breezy disco, 80s R&B, proto-house and vocoder jams that's beautifully mixed and concludes by recommending How to Wreck a Nice Beach to those of his listeners "who possess the ability to read". I echo that recommendation whole-heartedly.

Here's the instrumental version of one of the tracks featured in Mao's mix. The vocal version is actually a lot more entertaining but on that the vocoder kind of takes a back seat to the Fly Guy's ad-libs.



Ramsey 2C-3D: "Fly Guy" (Instrumental) (Tears of Fire, 1982)