(Fairy of the Black Rocks, 1902)



Nothing beats getting flashed by a skeleton in a snowy graveyard in 1902. In fact, I wanted to call this mix “Getting Flashed by a Skeleton in a Snowy Graveyard.” But then I listened to the Young D Boyz and heard chestnuts. Young D Boyz of course heard no such thing.

Listen and download here: Get That Chestnut From the Grave



If feeling chilly, go inside this UFO Jell-O Mold Party:

The ever patient Monk-One (NYC Trust) did all the work as usual, in between watching Fiend Without a Face and Ikarie XB-1. (If anyone can speak Czech, I’d be grateful for some subtitles). I brought in heaps of music with a loose idea of the sequencing and sat there and drank beer and tried to not knock over his son’s Brooklyn Bridge.

I’d say this was a vocoder mix were it not for the tobacco auctioneer, the heartbroken loner from Taylorsville, NC, the androgynous Prince clone, Juvenile’s bald–headed alien, the guy who claims he’s an iceberg, the UPS song, the Whispers, and a girl from New Orleans named Na’Tee saying, “Fuck Auto-Tune! Fuck a v-coder!” Twice, even. Damn, Na’Tee!

Anyway, there are lots of customized edits, winter bones, freak frozers, and shut-in joints on here, as well as some real snowman melters. No snowman acid rain water was drunken (dranken?) during the recording of this mix.

Many of the tracks were recommended by others, over the past couple of years after book was first published. Thank you Monk One, Dante Carfagna, Nate Smith, Spacey Sissick, Josh Dunn, Jeremy Campbell, Big Fun in the Fun Town, Noz, Marty Key, Tom Noble, Andrew Morgan, Lily Kane, Terry Kane, Bepe Loda, the man known as 12ManRambo, Jon Yu, Hua Hsu.



(0:00) Young D Boyz “MAC gOD”

As mentioned up there, this has all been a terrible misunderstanding. But the skeletons won’t listen to reason.



(0:56) Harm Drost, Speech After Removal of the Larynx (Smithsonian/Folkways)

Recorded at the Phonetic Laboratory of the Ear, University of Leiden.



(1:18) Zeus B Held “Europium”

Intermission in Zeus B. Held’s brain.

Apparently, Zeus B. Held stole my mom’s florescent kitchen halo and wore it on his head, like an angel, an angel in silver pants with his dick hanging out.



(1:44) Dorothy Collins “Mountain High Valley Low”

This song makes me of running in the mountains in November, through a pasture to the top of a hill where I touch the wizard’s nose carved into a post in an abandoned shack. Then my knees remind me of how much it sucks coming back down the mountain, and how, one day, when we’re old, and I’ve written 50 vocoder books, I’ll be forced to walk down. Then I remember the time I passed three black bear cubs, climbing up a tree, like three fuzzy Bell South repairmen, and how, as cute as those guys were, I was glad my knees got me the hell out of there.




(Everyone’s happy when the wizard walks by)



No vocoder here, but pretty advanced production for the early 1950s. Dorothy Collins backed by a gang of Dorothy Collinses. Be all you can be.



(2:46) Geraldine Stewart & the Gospel Song Writers “You Ought To Been There” /”Walking With The King”

A few years ago Marty Key (who runs the excellent Steady Sounds in Richmond, VA) let me borrow this psychedelic disco gospel vocoder 45. On the label you’ll find a drawing of winged serpents cast from hell and/or a Larry Cohen movie. I’d lost it, and It, at a party. After a year of feeling like a crudwump about the whole thing, a friend’s 2-year old found it among his 45s.

Thank you for saving my old behind, little one.

Geraldine talks about loving everyone and pissing off the devil because she’s walking with the king.



(5:14) Conrad Schnitzler “Berlin Express (The 4:08 To Paris)”

RIP Mr. Schnitzler. I haven’t taken the 4:08 to Paris. However I have taken the 8:08 to the dome, and the hungover 8:05 to Hamburg where I ended up in a record store playing Pyramid Plus, as well as German vocoder clips for an audience who helped translate a homily about keeping peace despite evil neighbors.



(8:09) Mirage “Mirage In the Space”

See image of UFO jell-o mold above, with indoor magic hour lighting? That is what this record is.



(8:50) Bernice Frazier “Will You Be the One”

After submitting the third book draft (almost done!), I went to the beach with my niece (Berenice), and my dad and stepmom. I read Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, which is recommended for anyone finishing an interminable project. I sat on the porch in a rocking chair and tried to determine whether Mr. Herzog was serious when he talked about tonsillectomies being performed with a vacuum cleaner in the Amazon. Meanwhile my niece read Watership Down and laughed at British rabbit names.

Also recommended for anyone trying to finish an interminable project: waking in the middle of the night and screaming, “The fields are covered with blood!”



(11:45) Sneak E “Fluff-U”

The A-side is “Land of Stuphph,” but it’s not until the flip,“Fluff-U,” that we are actually taken to the Land of Stuphph. At approximately 13:24, you will be mugged by the Stuphph.

There should be a weed dispensary called “The Puff & Stuphph.” And a dog wash/ fabric softener named “Fluff-U.” Not to be confused with the secret German cloud force called the Fluftwaffe.

The song is from Ohio, though the label is Straight From The Coast Records & Tapes. This makes me think there’s some secret beach portal in Ohio, on some Mt. Analogue.



(13:51) The Whispers “Keep On Loving Me”/ 12 seconds of Kraftwerk “Trans Europe Express”

“Keep On Loving Me” is the first song I ever taped off the radio. There are about 20 different possibilities for edits, as indicated by DJ Steef here.

We just grabbed the first swell until that German train showed up.

Steef also did the excellent Triolisme and Planet Caravan edits.



(15:42) Floating Points/Reel To Real “Love Me Like This”

No stranger to countless other mixes but “Keep On Loving Me” called for it.



(16:35) Trus’ Me feat. Dam Funk “Bail Me Out”

Inspired by Was (not Was) “Wheel Me Out.”

Last time I saw Dam Funk, he was shredding a Keytar at a top floor swimming pool at Soho House in Miami. There was nobody there and Dam was facing a beach masked by darkness. But we could hear the unvoiced hiss energy of the tide. I know you’re out there, ocean!



(17:32) Iz Army “Brainwash (Army of Shadows edit)”

According to Discogs, the Iz Army logo was designed by Philco, a vocoder contractor for the Air Force. Oh, really!

I once had a dream about Army of Shadows that involved Kraftwerk running a water ballet school/lab in occupied France.

If only Simone Signoret opened that suitcase and found a Philco vocoder stashed among her garments. Her luggage/that scene contained a stolen line about frequencies (“The wavelengths have changed”) that happened to wash up on Miami Beach in 1983. Or p. 96, admittedly.



(20:01) Next Movement “More Love” (Instrumental)

I visit Chicago for all my winter facelifts. I’ll be there in February for a talk at Northwestern where the vocoder book is being used for a media studies class.

This is the instrumental but I love the way he says, “I’ve got complicated things on my mind… too much static enigmatic.”



(21:51) Esophageal Voice (at two different octaves)
Speech After Removal of the Larynx (Smithsonian/Folkways)

“Air is driven into the esophagus by means of mouth and tongue. This air does not reach the stomach, but reverses direction and produces a vibration of the mucous membrane in the upper part of the esophagus as it again rushes forward. You will now hear the so-called injection of air.”



(22:27) Planet Funkatron

Before leaving for Dusseldorf, the incredibly monikered DJ Spacey Sissick, contacted me and said he’d found a 10-inch acetate in Long Island, bearing no identification marks other than “Planet Funkatron.” It turned out to be 9 minutes of freaking “Planet Rock” backwards, an effect that can be simply achieved in Garage Band, if you want to be a dick about it. But we don’t want to be dicks about it. This is an actual event from a real record!

What’s up to Badlands and Three Women: “For a while they lived in a tree house.”



(23:41) Nakion “Deus Ex Machina”

Which is Latin for “Do The Sex Machine.” Which is why I sucked at Latin, despite taking four years in high school. Anyway, this song is new. A new South Korean Latin vocoder classic.



(24:48) Shoc Corridor “Ice Berg”

Accusing your girlfriend of global warming is just downright unseemly. Maybe she’s just a really fly meteorologist. Maybe he found a glacier’s phone number in her wallet and got jealous. He’s a snowstorm. He’s an iceberg. He’s on some winter wonder twin shit. Shape of: A 1960s insane asylum where people get diagnosed with “erotic dementia.” Form of: a real bummer. To be taken under winter advisory.



(27:24) Spencer Tune “Nightmare (Maggots Over Antwerp)”

Still winter, maybe scarier. And British. Spencer Tune is British. It really does say “Maggots Over Antwerp” on the record. Apologies for cutting it off before the really dope 303 acid-y part, but we’ve got places to go. At the wrong speed it sounds like a good Geto Boys track.



(28:16) JAZAQ “All Systems Go”

According to Monk, Jazaq is really Jazai. But when he signed the contract for Enjoy Records, Bobby Robinson mistook the Q for an I, so Jazai became Jazaq. Jazaq’s the facts jack! An I for a Q and a tribute to Mantronix and the retired Serbian B-Boy I met in Dusseldorf (named Jantronix)



(30:36) U-Gents “Chain Gang”

I taped this off the radio in my dorm at college. Reminds me of something Kodwo Eshun once said about an Oasis show. “It was horrible! It was amazing!” Amazingly horrible. But I honestly think this is amazing.



(31:24) Matrix “It’s Time To Rock”

The “Def Beats” version of this Cali electro thing sounds really nice with a layer of “Uranium” on top.



(32:43) This Track Is Called If You Have A Copy Of This Song To Trade Please Contact Me At Your Earliest Convenience

This is from a Josh Dunn mix, which ultimately means it’s from Detroit. I grew up a Lions fan. My brother and his friend Vinnie Vickers pummeled me in a pile of damp leavcs, chanting “Thirty-Seven-Nothing”, after the Cowboys beat the Lions 37-0 in the 1970s. I think the Lions should be proud of how they played this past Saturday against the Saints, despite giving up 45 points.



(36:11) Fat Jon “B-Girl (Instr)”/ “Tobacco Auctioneering”
Vocal Styles and Resources In Folk Music (New World Records, 1978)

Instrumental from a Five Deez album, engineered for spring, when the tobacco auctioneer shows up in a woodchuck suit. No pocuscadabra (“You wouldn’t hit a bat in glasses”) was attempted to make the woodchuck suit fit. He naturally landed in here.



(39:36) Emerson “Sending All My Love” (edit)

Dear UPS,

Raise your brand profile and license this song now.

The “what’s wrong” and “family” stabs always make me sad.

Does he say, “Airmail stamps won’t do?”

The hook was once misheard by Daptone’s label manager as “sitting on a birdhouse.” There was an abandoned Boo Radley birdhouse in my neighborhood, with three stories and spinstered with cobwebs in the beak portals and gumballs in its den. It was in El-P’s backyard.

1988, from Morrow, Georgia.



(43:15) Lovebug Starski “Say What You Wanna Say” (Big Fun In The Big Town Edit)

Hope tinged with melancholy. Also known as: how the morning sun hits Manhattan in the winter. A little post-punk (see shimmer). Could be Freestyle even. There’s also a weird Michael Karoli-ish guitar that comes in later, but we’d since moved on. As the lore has it, Lovebug Starski is believed to be one of the first to yell the words hip-hop at a party. I once saw him fishbowl on a panel, when talking about what happened to the old school. It was incredibly moving. Starski is also behind one of the dopest moments on Paul’s Boutique.



(45:26) Whodini/Conny Plank “Nasty Lady Dub” (Monk’s dub of a dub)

The following was licensed with permission from the bottom of p. 206 of the best-selling book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Nasty Lady from Nasty Lady to Nasty Lady.

“Nasty Lady” was a stone-boot crunch. Its drum machine suggested Lurch repeatedly head-butting a low-flying doorframe, his brain apparently in no hurry to push the duck button. When Whodini asks, “How many of y’all know Nasty Ladies?”, it’s the nasty ladies who answer, screeching on behalf of their men, assuring they’d known no better. Impressive, even startling, is how this screech carries itself across the room with all that back-raking decay. But, as Samuel R. Delaney once wrote: “There are times when all the helling and the yelling won’t fill the lack.” So the late Conny Plank treats us/it to a 9-minute dub version.



(48:17) Bassonlians “Bass Command”

Miami! Maggotron! The first to use Bass as a verb. Gerunderpants!



(49:08) King Eric & The Groove “The Groove”

Expensive! Can’t afford! From Cali! Getting lazy!



(49:41) Camille Bloch Chocolate Ad Made By Siemens

Trans Swiss Chocolate Express.



(49:56) Computer Jay “Maintain (FaltyDL edit)”

One of my favorite remixes from last year.



(50:53) Na’Tee “Back 2Da Block”

Excellent use of the human voice to express antipathy towards Auto-Tune and “the V-Coder.”

Now see here, young lady!



(51:04) Juvenile “400 Degreez”

I think Manny Fresh is using a cello for the carrier wave?

Give me your best three bald-headed aliens. Off top (harf!), I’m thinking It Came From Outer Space; This Island Earth (nope—those are brains, I think); Blue Sunshine (no—hair loss caused by LSD); Ultimate Warrior (come on, that’s just Yul Brynner); THX-1138 (clearly I need some help here); Close Encounters of the Third Kind (now we’re getting somewhere—my brother’s Xmas tree looked like a spaceship from Close Encounters.) (Bonus back-slaps if you can find the Close Encounters reference in the “Pack Jam” chapter. Hint: It’s not a spaceship but it definitely involves Richard Dreyfuss.)



(52:40) Outkast “Synthesizers”

In which you have Outkast, George Clinton, and a vocoder on the same track. But this is the instrumental, so it’s the thought that counts. And it’s a nice thought. (Incidentally, one of the worst terms ever is “thought-piece.”)

Nice of LaFace to do instrumentals of the entire Aquemini album though they left off “Da Art of Storytellin’ (Part 2).”



(53:36) Parabuccal Speech
Speech After Removal of the Larynx (Smithsonian, Folkways)

“We are not able to say exactly how far this singer is using his normal voice.”

—Harm Drost, Phonetic Laboratory of the Ear, University of Leiden, Netherlands.

“The air required to form the basic tone is collected in the space between the cheek and upper jaw; the cheek serves as an air reservoir. The basic sound is formed between the cheek and teeth.” (Not the cheek & gum where Walt Garrison stores his Skoal.)



(54:11) Virgil Charles Mashburn “Why Should It Be”

This loner thing with nice guitar is from Taylorsville, NC, near Morganton and Hickory. We always passed through Morganton during family trips to the mountains in Linville. The witch in the window at Spake’s Antiques was a reliable scare during that drive, as was the Broughton Mental Institution, where my dad once photographed my brothers and myself. That photo will be found when I disappear.



(57:59) Keith Sweat “How Deep Is Your Love (Instrumental Dub)”

A classic Teddy Riley vocoder ballad. Keith Sweat had great sweaters.



(59:32) Young D Boyz “MAC gOD”

And back to you, Mr. Chestnuts Grave.



(1:01:18) Zeus B Held “Europium”

Sort of like when you when you nap at the beach (or think you’re napping because your eyes are closed) and catch all these fragments of conversation at different distances mixed with the froth and tide.

Thanks to Mr. Monk-One for housing the living shit out of the paperbacksgiving jam this past Saturday night in Brooklyn. When he played Dayton’s “Sound of Music,” I was put on the phone with Shawn Sandridge, Dayton’s songwriter and vocodererererer (and also the guy behind Project Future’s “Ray-Gun-Omics”).

Next week I’ll be doing vocoder talks in the Netherlands and in Germany. Scroll down for information and flyers.

(Droogs play a game of Telephone on the set of A Clockwork Orange*)



The vocoder book is now available in paperback today, with all kinds of bonus terminal beach slaps. It only took a month. That second book is a cinch!

I’d say the paperback drops today, but I prefer you held onto it. Or wore a helmet with two chinstraps. I’d say it gently whispers through your office window like Snake Plissken’s glider, but that may infer that my book is a breeze. (And that your window is open. Though it should be—it’s nice outside.) Or cool air. Or that my book’s breath smells like the inside of a fat wooden leg. Or that you should rip out all the pages and see what flies.

It’s a paperback, so you can batflap your face with it. What I’m really trying to say here is my book is a Troop song. Sometimes I wish it was a farmhouse full of bats. When I taught at a prep school outside Orange, Virginia, there was an old farmhouse that had bats in the walls. One of the summer deans lived there. He’d agitate the bats by jabbing the wall with the butt of a tennis racket. Sounded like the house was taking off. We’d just sit there drunk and listen to the walls flutter, hoping they wouldn’t get out.

Spread spectrum communications now means COLOR. The color is no longer out of space, it’s everywhere.

Said the man from Nottingham who once disguised himself as Robot Redboard: “This may appear a bit strange to you, but I like color.”

The man from the BBC—his shirt is pink!

Forrest J. Ackerman’s Cadillac—is red!

The vocoder exhibit in Chicago—is… azure?

The ELO gatefold—is a gorgeous spaceship!

The cover for Tonto’s Expanding Headband—is, uh, what is that!??

My copy of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream—is still beat to shit!

My best friend from high school—is still on p. 219 and apparently has a tanning membership at Electric Beach!

The sky is blue. It’s uncannily warm for November. Please get me out of here.

More folks have joined the story. A dragon wears a speaking Keytar around its neck. Teen Wolf appears at a high school gym in Compton. Ned “Neck of the Woods” Gerblasnky sings “Feel Like Makin’ Love” through an Electrolarynx. A Dutch kid predicts approaching Stutka bombers by sticking his finger in the air. And Just-Ice loves animals: “I like to wear my Gold in mouth so that I can spit on it and know it’s there.”



*Image courtesy of Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (Little Brown) by Christiane Kubrick. Thanks to the Kubrick Estate for allowing the image to appear in the paperback edition.

This special robots-only issue of Rocktober was recently declassified from a stack of magazines at my place. Along with: The Source (Nov. 1994, Redman cover, knot of tissue, right nostril); issue of Time with Nabokov on cover (Artifice, acrostics, lepidoptera, two jackhammer operators falling in love) ; Mad (with Don Martin’s utterly essential Super Hero Sound Effects); Rap Pages (Goodie Mob emerging from a swamp in Georgia, much to the surprise of the local snake-leech-stoat-wild boar community), Military History (JFK, on phone, clutching his imploding forehead during Cuban Missile Crisis, next to the headline: WORSE THAN WE KNEW); New Yorker with the George Saunders story about the woman who answers the door with a dirty sock feeding on her shoulder; ITT newsletter with Nixon’s future science adviser, Ed David, talking about how vocoders will bring us closer to the robot (run, robot, run!); Famous Monsters of Filmland (Frogs!); the Life hip-hop issue with Bambaataa, Fab Five Freddy, DXT etc. (kidding! I scissored that thing to death and taped the pictures on the wall as consolation after getting cut from the basketball team in seventh grade); a diagram of a Kraftwerk show rendered on graph paper by Pete Relic; Christian Science Monitor (“Talking Soapsuds on the Air? Blame It On the Sonovox,” Sept. 2, 1941); DE:BUG (issue with feature on HTWANB, as well as the world’s most extensive collection of artificial voice toys, in German); every ego trip; no Blazes; one One Nut Network; postcard from Funkenklein addressed to the offices of Delicious Vinyl (“Coolin’ in Tokyo with the Jungle Bros”); Famous Monsters of Filmland (The Green Slime!); issue of Urb where they let me write about how one could store their entire record collection in the back-leg of a cockroach after the apocalypse; email from former Spin editor Simon Reynolds saying my double review of Ui/Kriedler was frolicking in too much jive; a promo one-sheet of T La Rock’s “Back To Burn” 12 that includes Sleeping Bag records’ cute koala logo (which, along with “When the Levee Breaks,” I listened to, on Walkman while on the bus heading to “states” in Asheville, NC, where my high school basketball team lost, though I take no responsibility, pine-riding in a pair of Worthy Expresses); a laminated Tommy Boy press release from Sept. 1983 (includes photo with caption “Whiz Kid and wife Betty discuss the merits of Linn Drum vs. Dr. Click beat box during a break in the mixing session”); Tuba Frenzy (with my “Stabbing In Words” story that borrowed a still from Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris), a vaguely legible photocopy of the fax of Reginald Dennis’ letter of resignation to Source publisher Davie Mays, concerning abovementioned Redman issue that contained a certain feature on the Almighty RSO that had been indelicately forced into the magazine, thus burping the layout, which, according to one crackpot theory (mine) resulted in a byline casualty (also mine), as a review of Da Youngsta’s third(?) album went unattributed, leading me to believe that the Almighty RSO had sabotaged my Source debut, a beef wisely pocketed during my interview conducted with RSO’s Ray Benzino, late one night at the Source offices, when we discussed the murder of Paul “C” McKasty.

It’s cool. I wrote my name in there anyway.

And finally, at the bottom where the bass blooms, something my mom copied off Madeleine L’ Engle’s bathroom wall (Tesseract, hi), which I was going to read at my brother’s funeral, but opted instead for “Where 2 O’ Clock Came From,” a poem by Kenneth Patchen, because, really, check how that old dragon couple “quick-tailed the sky down” while some unidentified creatures—thinking woodland here, in spats, but it’s your call—upset a table, also presumably falling from the sky, and merrily stuck their faces inside a clock while deciding what time it is. All at once. Their clock. Their call.

“I believe:
that imagination is stronger than knowledge
that myth is more potent than history
that dreams are more powerful than facts
that hope always triumphs over experience
that laughter is the only cure for grief
and that love is stronger than death.”

Additional cure for grief: dub version of Fantasy Three “It’s Your Rock”

How ghost it?

It ghosts.

ABOVE: This is Spyder D. (Not photographed: His partially healed anterior cruciate ligament.)



In 1981, Duane “Spyder D” Hughes blew up his knee after landing funny on a basketball* court in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This freak wrench ended his college reel yet freed him up to hang out with the Frost Band and make “Big Apple Rappin’“—ACL be damned.

As a kid growing up in Queens, Spyder was once sent to the store to buy a trumpet, but instead returned with a boom box and a copy of the Ohio Players’ Skin Tight.

His mother was thrilled.

He learned to make beats in Vaughan Mason’s basement by tricking the lights on the Roland 808 drum machine. “If the lights look stupid, chances are the beat is stupid,” he once told me. “And I mean, stupid bad.”

So into the little blue people yonder he went.

Recorded in 1982, “Smerphies Dance” was an electro menace that landed Spyder a gig at Bond’s International in Times Square—wearing a Spiderman suit.

“DO NOT wear that Spiderman suit!” advised Russell Simmons beforehand, trying to decide whether he should manage his old high school friend from Queens.

“But I had the original Peter Parker joint from Ruby’s Costume Shop!”

So Spyder took the stage and a stance, fisted his armpits and shot the crowd with his elbows.

“I was like ‘Yeah, I got on a Spiderman costume, WHAT!’”

The crowd went smurfshit and Russell became his manager that night.

Yet Spyder’s label, Telestar Cassettes, threatened to KGB him with a voiceprint phonoscopy if he recorded elsewhere. (“They claimed they had speech analyzers!”) So when West End asked Spyder to rap over an Italian soundtrack Sesso Matto (“Sex Is Funny”), he cloaked his beanpole baritone in a vocoder—speech analyzer by birth, secret masking agent by necessity. He spliced and looped some red-handed congas from 2″ recording tape (no digital sampling), called the song “B Beat Classic” and credited the alias of his tour bus driver, Butch.

“What I learned from Vaughn Mason was you gotta shoot it like a movie. And it’s good to not know what the hell you’re doing.”

But not knowing who the hell you are? Priceless. Spyder remembers the session for “B Beat Classic,” up all night losing his mind in the studio, mummified in sex-is-funny tape, scrunching his nose into a sustained “yeeeahh” that spooled around the building. This guy with spaghetti knees, unraveling, listening to a machine run off with his larynx.

“I made it for the cats droppin’ acid in Europe.”



*I wish I’d made a dope record after blowing my knee out during basketball practice. But the Dilaudid they gave me after surgery… Weeeeeeeeeeeee!

Bonus: Spyder got his name from his spin moves on the basketball court.

(Mostly/originally appeared in Wax Poetics a few years ago.)

The Votoader returns. This farmer with a frog affair comes from the insert that accompanies the Folkways record, Speech After Removal of the Larynx, released in 1964 and acquired, finally, at Academy Records in 2011. I traded a bunch of disco 12s for a recording of people trying to communicate without vocal chords, with the help of Western Electric, their stomachs, a parabuccal reservoir of air stored between the cheek and gum, and frogs. That’s my Friday night.

The cover art, drawn by Jaap Groendal, “symbolizes a man without a larynx and a violin with broken strings.”







But the photo. The frog appears to flying, not unlike the frog those bored murderers strapped to a skyrocket in The Tree of Life. But alas, no. It’s just an inset of a frog that appears to be in the air (where our voices originate, incidentally.)

I was similarly deceived by the scissors in the picture of Frankenstein’s monster below. As a child I always assumed the giant scissors were flying towards Karloff’s (Glenn Strange’s?) forehead, aiming for a flattop trim.* Upon reading Frankenstein, I was discouraged to find no flying scissors. No monster getting his lugs lowered. A closer look revealed that the scissors were attached to the facade of a barber shop. Not one to let reality get the best of my day, I imagined the scissors—after a visit with Jack Parsons at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena—could drag the building towards the monster’s bangs. This is what happens when a child gets left alone with Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of Horror Films: giant scissors drag barbershops into outer space.







As for the frog caption:  The farmer “caused it to croak by stroking it with his tongue…so the story goos.”**  I believe the goos wasn’t a misprint but perhaps a gross suggestion. Maybe if the farmer kisses the frog it’ll turn into Prince’s original demo of “Joy In Repetition,” which is just plain sick.



*You are now listening to “Set It Off” by Big Daddy Kane: “Smooth Father, give ‘em a flat-top trim.”

**I don’t have time to watch The Wicker Man again, but I believe there’s a scene where a kid sticks a frog in his mouth.

***Here’s a story I did for The Oxford American about how I put Timbaland to sleep with an old bass record back in 2005.

(Courtesy High Country News/Seventh Annual Report of the Missouri State

Entomologist)

Sorry for the service interruption. We’ve been fooling with the expanded paperback edition of How to Wreck a Nice Beach, due out in November. Which is to say a giant grasshopper has been standing between me and my blog duties.

Anywizards, one day, I’d like to tell you about a conversation I had with Hellstrom Chronicle director Walon Green in 2002. He was talking about smuggling locusts into the US from Africa. “Apparently it’s illegal to start a plague in the state of California,” he said. Needless to say, this is one of my favorite interviews. I was so happy afterward that I forgot about crossing reality and was nearly flattened by a UPS truck.

For now, the future, I’ll be presenting at Eyebeam next Monday (June 13), along with Steve Goodman/Kode9’s AUDiNT collective, in anticipation of their Dead Record Office exhibition, opening Friday, June 17. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be flushed out the Vietnam jungle by “unsound” Infrabass weaponry, here’s your chance.

(If you’ve ever wondered what’s it like to flushed out of a subwoofer by a Dynamix II vocoder song that says, “Toilet bowl rock you to the ground,” go here.)

On Monday, expect to hear from Operation Wandering Soul, the WWII audio decepticon program, the specter of spectral communications, military use of “vestigial emanations,” and the professor who threw Goethe’s stolen larynx in front of a train.

I will also be playing a special disco gospel vocoder chant called “You Ought To Been There,” recorded in 1980 by Geraldine Stewart. The logo is a pair of flapdancing winged serpents straight out of a Larry Cohen movie that discouraged rooftop sun-bathing. (Is this the voice of Q?) Shattered like a glass goblin.

(SIGSALY Vocoder terminal “X-Ray” at Selfridge Department store in London, after a German V-2 rocket attack. Dec. 1944. Photograph by Stephen Geis)



During my first night in the seaside town of Whitstable, a man tossed a radiator—and himself—through his motel window and landed on the balcony below. Broken glass, everywhere. Prior to defenestration, Ken Hollings, author of Welcome To Mars, described the motel as “a new mathematical dimension.” (His harrowing account lives here. Fortunately, the man survived.) I’d just DJed a Cornhole tournament in Vegas over Super Bowl weekend. All I wanted was some grey beach. No blade of grass.

I was in Whitstable to do a vocoder slideshow for Off the Page, a literary festival co-produced by Sound & Music and The Wire.

You know you’re in the right place when you walk into a conversation about “an attic full of weeping mutants.” (Apparently, everybody’s seen Doomwatch.) And how the Electro-Larynx had made several appearances in Southpark, buzzing against the maligned throat of Vietnam vet Ned Gerblanski. (Gerblanski’s version of “Feel Like Makin’ Love” is here.)

I did three presentations while in the UK: Off the Page, Café Oto, and at Goldsmith’s (University of London, hosted by Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher).

(Peachoid at Whitstable, Off the Page Festival. Photo by Ken Hollings)



Off the Page took place in an old theater populated by headless manikins in wedding dresses and Victorian drape. It was fun hearing “Pack Jam” swallow those old stage ghosts. Hollings: “’Pack Jam’ made me want to write, because I knew I would never make anything as cool as that. I heard it and knew I was doomed.”

I forgot to tell them that Bell Labs was surrounded by barbed wire turned inwards (nobody gets out) and how one BTL engineer described the vocoder as a “book with seven seals.”

Steve Beresford and David Toop, who produced that Frank Chickens song with the vocoder doing the Tan-Tan-Tanuki chant, were in the house. Also in attendance were Green Gartside (Scritti Politti) and Stanley Kubrick’s assistant, Tony Frewin. We talked about Zardoz and Lolita, and feeding Peter Seller’s back-porch jitters to a speech psychologist. “I get sort of carried away, being so normal and everything.” The word normal—which appears with the frequency of brains in Critical Beatdown—never sounded weirder. We are discomforted by its frequency, its insistence. If you’re compelled to say everything is normal, then most likely it is not. The familiar is a Quilty perversion.

Jonny Trunk presented rare Tristram Cary shorts. Trunk, who issued the “deadly dangerous” soundtrack for Blood On Satan’s Claw on his excellent label Trunk Records, also collects underwater music, aptly described as “people making music for a place without sound.” At some point in the evening, a few hours before our neighbor attempted to fly his radiator out to sea, yet after discussing the “increasing nightmare of not remembering who people are,” Mr. Trunk identified my pupil’s echo. “You have keyhole eye.” (It’s the left one.)

Ken Hollings’ “Cage Post-Cage” talk was enhanced by a smoke machine.

My left leg fell dead-ass asleep during Kodwo Eshun’s talk on his favorite music writing. Tried stomping it back to life in the aisle and failed. Made a wounded galumph for the exit. More stomping ensued in the theater basement. Leg regained consciousness upon discovering that the merch table had sold out of How to Wreck a Nice Beaches. (And that I was still having way too much fun.)

It’s alive!

This dead limb thing was no reflection on Kodwo’s presentation since he, uh, included an excerpt from my vocoder book: PAGE 227*—the part about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where a freshly podded Donald Sutherland emits a clone drone in Golden Gate Park, in broad daylight, in front of god and bagpipes. According to IBS, one can only be cloned (or duped) while asleep. My leg nodding off was a good start. Let the dub version of “Biters in the City” finish the job.

Three nights later at the Café Oto talk, someone asked if I was aware that I had been cloned. (I wasn’t.) He then told me to “look up Gordon Darcy.”

(Cafe Oto, Wire Salon Series, London. Photo by Cailin Deery)

(Cafe Oto and “The Foghorn.” Photo by Cailin Deery)



A few notes:

During the Q&A at Oto, a guy in the back said I had to make a choice: The Time Machine or Quatermass & The Pit. Any loyalty to HG—thanks for that funk epigraph—was compromised by the Quatermass scene involving a construction crane being smashed into a giant locust from Mars. All topped off by a facemelt. The choice is yours.

Goldsmith’s (a University of London offshoot) had my favorite batch of students yet. Said one: “Don’t tone it down and don’t stop cussing.”

That night ended at Steve Goodman/Kode9’s apt where we listened to “Purple Beats” and Burial remixing Massive Attack’s entire album, and watched vintage ghost army footage of Signal Corp officers mixing with three turntables inside a truck.

It turns out that 19th century naturalist and conchology books are mad expensive in Edinburgh. I was tempted by The Inmates of My Garden, which included the chapter “Eyes and No Eyes Is a Tale to Be Found at Home.” (Not to be confused with Cold War in A Country Garden by Lindsay Gutteridge.)

The Stone Tape is dope.

Is it tourist-y to visit the wine bar where they used to burn witches?

(Not the first edition and slightly warped.)



The cover of the first—and unaffordable—edition of A Hole Is To Dig (illustrated by Maurice Sendak) has the subhead: “The First Book of First Definitions.”

“A face is so you can make faces.”

“A face is something to have on the front of your head.”

And of course…

“A seashell is to hear the sea.”

Rondo Hatten played the role of Hoxton Creeper in Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death.

Missed the chance to see the place where JFK’s brother’s plane blew up during Operation Aphrodite and the 16th century town that fell into the sea and is now being exhumed by sonic mapping.

Speaking of Operations, here’s Churchill’s list of prohibited Ops that “came up” during the Q&A at Café Oto:

woebetide
massacre
jumble
trouble
fidget
flimsy
pathetic
jaundice
bunnyhug
flood
smooth
sudden
supreme

Famous racehorses and constellations are permitted.

*p. 227. I am only jocking myself to reach a far more alarming truth.

Thanks to Cecilia Wee, Mary Liles, Tony Herrington, George Mahood, Derek Walmsley and Gordon Darcy.

(Felix Visser, right, with Christopher “SpaceStation” Moore, 1981)

Last year, it was brought to my attention that my book caused a man from Holland to choke on his marmalade toast. The victim was Felix Visser, dismayed that HTWANB had snubbed his excellent Syntovox 221 vocoder (an oversight to be remedied next print run). I know better than to stand between a man and his breakfast, so I conducted a Q&A for reparations. Teeth to toast. Here, Felix discusses his vocoder and his marmalade. Also: the foretelling of Allied air raids, the satisfaction of nailing a laptop to a totem pole, and how he once cloned the voice of the Secretary General of NATO, the controversial and ubiquitous Mr Joseph Luns.

Felix, this Heimlich Maneuver’s for you.

When was your first encounter with the talking machine?

It was in the early Fifties: Sparky’s Magic Talking Piano. It touched me deeply, considering I was probably the same age as the little boy in the recording.

That piano helped Sparky cheat his way through Flight of the Bumblebee.

I had to practice playing the piano every day. The fact that the piano could talk—I must have accepted this as one of the miracles thrown at us after the war. Technology was all around. Everything was possible.

The Dr. Seuss film, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, had a dungeon master’s take on enforced piano lessons. “Tickled to death.”

A good friend of mine, the Chicago-based composer Terry Fryer, whom I usually refer to as Dr. T, has got those 5,000 fingers. Turn the music sheet upside down, and he continues playing it modus cancricans and upside downans.

Did you try to build a talking machine as a kid?

Later in high school, during physics classes I had an encounter with a facsimile of one of those contraptions made of wood, leather, copper—traditional lab stuff. [Ed. based on the one built by Wolfgang Von Kempelen in the 18th century.] In the mid-Fifties, physics class labs consisted just of iron balls and rings, candles, mirrors, wood constructions, copper, brass, leather, bakelite, ruhmkorffs, wimshursts, Bunsen burners. They were a postwar variation of a freak-out darkroom.

I wish we made artificial throats in Physics.

At that age (12-13) I was way too young and lacked enough “charge” to fantasize about an electronic solution, however, an electric solution for Von Kempelen’s talking machine, yes! Thinking of the blowing end of a vacuum cleaner: use an electromotor instead of the manually operated bellows. Voices originate in wind, don’t they?

“The vacuum cleaner is on the tarmac.” That’s my friend’s code for a vocoder drone.

In the 19th century, as I learned later, Sir Charles Wheatstone built a better mechanical speech apparatus.

The one Edgar Allen Poe wrote about…

I’m not familiar with the device, but I guess it still was the old wood and copper trick. Funnily enough it was Alexander Bell who improved the machine. It was still wood and copper, but this time with rubber bellows. Bell veered off this toy and concentrated on his real goal: to transfer the human voice through a copper wire. The vocoder became serious after I got a demo of the big EMS vocoder in London. This must have been around 1976.

Those old EMS demos were strange: stock exchange reports, conversations with animals, and a news report entitled “Two Teenage Girls, Grisly News.”

Synthesizers still being a novelty, I was very much into using real sounds in music, like the “old musique concrète.” Therefore I was very impressed by the “I Claudius” main theme, in which they used the sound of a circular saw-blade at the end of its travel through a piece of wood. Zzzziinnggggggg! I wonder if anyone noticed it.

(At the AES, with friend and vocoder pioneer Dr Harald Bode, and Mrs Bode, after the presentation of Bode’s paper and introduction of the Barber Pole Filter)

When was Synton founded?

I established Synton Electroncis in early 1973. It was a two-man band. The company was set up to develop a duo-phonic synthesizer, called Syrinx. This was merely a result of being annoyed with a number of problems I’d encountered with an EMS Synthi A, which I had bought in early ‘71 for the small electronic studio I’d built for my work as a composer, mainly of film music. I approached EMS to see if there would be a way to promote and sell their stuff in Holland.

You were also translating science-fiction paperbacks into Dutch to help keep Synton afloat…

Robert Sheckley was my favorite one. I translated many short stories by him. “The People Trap” was a very good one. We’re talking early Seventies now. Sheckley was visionary in how society would change. “People Trap” was in fact the first story on what later would be known as “reality TV” and what will finally become Internet Reality. I did some Heinlein, Silverberg, Simak and Asimov too. [Ed: The vocoder makes a cameo in Silverberg’s “Halfway House.”]

What was your perception of the US and technology at the time?

There was a wide gap between the two continents—literally and culturally. European culture was not a melting pot, as the US had become (by brute force!) but a tombola. Or “potluck” if something would match. WWII did a lot in the sense that we, people in Europe (I’m not saying Europeans, because they did not exist and maybe still don’t) (re)discovered a totally different world: the USA. Which brought us all these goodies that were so comfortable and nice, pampering and modern. Pics of Roy Rogers and his Appaloosa with chewing gum. But they were also unfamiliar and possibly dangerous things. I remember watching a house burn down. I was nine years old. Bystanders whispered that the fire originated in the closet, where clothes were hung that had been washed in “these new synthetic detergents from America.” Spontaneous combustion. This is just to give you an impression of how naive (even postwar) people in Europe were—unwritten pages with one goal: no more war and let the future be golden.

(Visser and Roger Linn, inventor of Pumpkin’s favorite drum machine, doing their ventriloquist act, 1983)

I’d interviewed a Dutch Signal Corps officer who mentioned a Siemens-manufactured vocoder called Elcrovox, which was used during the Cold War. What were your memories of the war as a child in Holland? Those famous intercepts of Churchill phone calls took place on a beach near Noordwijk, which served as an impetus for the Allies to deploy Bell Labs’ vocoder X-system/SIGSALY.

I was born in April 1943, so my recollections of the war are very dim. I was told, however, that I was used as a kind of bombing flight foreteller. When the planes of the Allied forces were passing over Holland to bomb Germany, I would sit up in bed, long before the planes were near and stick my finger up in the air, saying “Vlieger komt!” (Flyer comes!). And I was always right—within three minutes they were there. Not ESP, but rather sensitive to VLF, I guess.

When did you develop the Syntovox vocoder?

Syntovox 221, the big one, was developed in 1977 and 1978, and presented to the world in 1979 at the New York AES Convention. This is where I met Wendy Carlos for the first time. We started at point zero and in the blind. We took orders for three vocoders and had sandwiches brought in.

Were you aware of the vocoder demonstrations at the 1964 World’s Fair? This had a significant impact on Carlos, who was one of your biggest fans.

No, I was playing gigs, as a drummer, mostly for American officers and NCOs who were based in France. The World’s Fair in 1964 was held in New York, which in those days was on a different planet, a desired goal, which could only be reached with a steamer in six days, or in a Super Constellation—this magnificent, beautiful flying fish with three tail wings.

Did Synton have clients outside of music, i.e. for speech pathology analysis, government military encryption, etc?

Yes, we had dealings with phonetic labs—one in Leiden [Ed: The 1964 Folkways release, Speech After Removal of the Larynx, was recorded at the Phonetic Laboratory of the Ear in Leiden] and one in Nymegen. Another interesting one was with KLM, after this terrible plane crash on Tenerife in 1977. They approached us in 1978 when we were still beta-testing the vocoder. They were talking about equipping their flight simulators with a Syntovox, to manipulate speech and scramble or distort messages. Later, after all the investigations, it turned out the accident was mainly caused by a clash of characters and a very long wait at the runway rather than by misinterpreting messages. The co-pilot was but-butting and did not want to take off. The Captain said, “Enough of this, let’s go for it.”

It always struck me that people who were more into artificial speech than I was, ignored the importance of inflections in speech. I thought the electric shaver, which had to be pressed against the larynx, was way too primitive. [Ed: This led to the invention of the Sonovox.] Even in those years with an electro-mechanical device of which the frequency could have been modulated manually, speech could have sounded a lot better and less robotic.

(Visser with Bob Moog at Terry “Dr. T” Fryer’s place, Chicago, 1984)

Robert Moog was often broke, on the verge of bankruptcy—his engineers viewed the vocoder as a distraction, a waste of time. How did you survive?

Bob never liked doing business for the sake of it—I didn’t either. There’s one reason to be on the verge of disaster, constantly. He once told me that he’d become too old to listen to his workers’ family and social problems. And he went on: “I guess I’ve always been too old for that.”

Getting back to vocoders: His engineers may well have been right. Nobody survived on vocoders. We were no exception. We got some more time before the bell tolled for us by making other products. Modular (analog) synths, the Syrinx monophonic synth with a revolutionary filter section (a formant filter!), which, incidentally, was the fruit of numerous brainwave sessions Bob and I had. This Syrinx, though, didn’t budge when we released it in 1982 and it got a coup de grace with the release of the DX7. All of a sudden the world wanted FM synths.

Talk about “Shortening the Amazement Curve.”

People had become aware that everything was possible, so the amazement curve got shorter and shorter. I guess one could compare the impact of the effect with that of “playing” (multi-voiced) the sound of a starting Harley Davidson on the first Emulator. People would just fall apart when hearing it.

In spite of the fact that we claimed to have made “the intelligible machine,” we never focused on the speech part. I personally think that the principle of vocoding—imposing characteristics of one sound upon another—is or should have been much broader than just using speech as an exciter. One should realize that expression stems from the “envelope”, it’s not only in the audio spectrum. I remember that we’d built a very accurate pitch-follower for the NOS (Dutch National Broadcast System) to be used in conjunction with Syntovox 221. When we started using it during evaluation, we were flabbergasted: The machine sounded like a human being. But the phase shift caused by the very steep filters we used (54 dB/octave) created some aliasing effects with the constantly changing formant information.

As a writer, terms like “aliasing effect” are very appealing. What musicians used the Syntovox or expressed interest in using it?

Tangerine Dream, Klaus Netzle, Bruno Spoerri, Johann Timman (aka John Nammitt), ELO, Philippe Catherine. There must have been hundreds of them. We never supported sponsoring to profile our products in the market for a number of reasons, and we operated via a distributor and/or dealer network. Feedback was scarce, so I really don’t know to whom all vocoders went.

By the way, most musicians get trapped by their instruments. The industry and its marketers greedily make them believe that only their imagination is the limit. (Which, in fact, is true!) So, if you buy this or that, you’ll be able to make fascinating music. Oh, I can now write a book because I have a word processor? Glorifying the tool is like putting too much weight on the importance of the tool, while creativity should be leading.

There we are, with all these musicians desperately waiting for their new instrument to be able to conceive their ultimate work. Anyway, I believe that most musicians who bought a vocoder, regardless of its make, were just looking for new effects. But effects and gimmicks get boring very quickly.

Fortunately a handful of users—one of them definitely being Wendy Carlos—were willing to experiment with the vocoder tool and produce very interesting and beautiful music, using it as a shaping, modulating and enveloping instrument, not as a gag. I think Wendy did fantastic work. It was so refreshing and inspiring to hear sounds that were sound-sounds, not vocoder sounds, albeit produced and/or processed by a vocoder. That, I think, is the real thing.

The sound-sound.

I could fantasize for hours about what one could do with mouth/voice controllers, not necessarily mimicking speech. A sound is a sound is a sound is a sound (taken from the quadruple rose by Gertrude Stein), only when it is a sound-sound.



The Syntovox had worldwide interest…

In all we must have sold close to a thousand vocoders. Beats me where the bulk went. They were distributed in Brazil, Hungary, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, England, the USA, Russia, (former) Yugoslavia, Belgium, France, Spain. Mainly to radio stations. I know of one peculiar sale to the Belgian Broadcast System. I traveled to Brussels. Arriving an hour late with our Belgian distributor because of heavy traffic, the “brass” audience, about ten managers, was a bit annoyed. Since there was not much time left they told me to keep it snappy and they asked for an imitation of Joseph Luns, Secretary General of NATO. Luns had a particular type of voice and way of speaking, which I’d studied a bit. Lots of pink noise and VLF modulation, a proper formant-shift patch, plus some of the wording he used did the job. I know that it was freaking real to the true Joseph L. Hurray, one more unit sold. But what in hell were they going to do with that effect?

What were your impressions of the vocoder’s use by artists like Kraftwerk? Or later in early Eighties hip hop? Do you feel like the sound has been taken as far as it can go?

Kraftwerk were the users of the first hour of the commercialized vocoder. What they did with it was a reflection of what was considered new and exciting in that era. One could not separate the influence of the vocoder from music of that period, just like one could not separate the serpent from medieval music. For that reason I believe that the sounds have taken as far as they could go, then.

I apologize, on behalf of my book, that it made you choke on your marmalade toast. And I thought I had exhausted all the “Pack Jam” possibilities.

In spite of not being featured in your book, I believe you have created the ultimate book on vocoders. Almost ultimate. For the second run and following, please do include Syntovox, just for integrity, posterity—and for becoming really ultimate. And please do introduce me to “Pack Jam.”

What makes your jam so special?

Our marmalade jam is special because the fruits—oranges, tangerines, lemons—come from Corsica, the big French island in the Mediterranean. We pick them in winter, around Christmas and New Year’s Day, just as they grow wild. They are untreated, with the taste of the Fifties, when those fruits were not yet being manipulated (for instance, manipulated to not produce seeds so we wouldn’t have to spit out the pits). It’s called giving up everything to be comfortable, sacrificing pleasure. How would Tangerine Dream have sounded if they’d been Seedless Tangerines?

What’s up with the laptop totem pole?

The Laptop Totem Pole was inspired by, of course, the totem pole of which the intention differs from culture to culture. The laptop refers to a culture of disposable goods. Since those laptops kept piling up after a short (anticipated?) life, irreparable or very costly, so that buying a new one was cheaper, I thought about doing something creative with them. So I nailed them on a wooden plank. It gave me satisfaction. After a while I took them to the dumpster, where they belonged in the first place.

(Bell Labs’ “Floating Wing”/Millennium Falcon, 1964 World’s Fair)

1. The following used the vocoder in 2010:

a.) David Lynch
b.) Ciara
c.) Target Santa Robot
d.) Target Nutcrackers
e.) James Blake
f.) De La Soul
g.) Big Boi
h.) All of the above except Big Boi

2. My dad claimed to hear a vocoder:

a.) From a dirty Pink Pony stashed in a pram in a Polish bakery
b.) In his new titanium cobalt kneecap
c.) Through the 102 JAMZ Jam Machine
d.) During a phone call with an old stuttering classmate named Hogblood Hodges

3.) A Kentucky magazine described How to Wreck a Nice Beach as:

a.) “A mega-pill of mule-choking insights”
b.) “A mega-box of mule-team Borax”
c.) “Megalon Vs Godzilla”
d.) “A metaphor for the Omega Man’s Ray-Bans.”
e.) “Do what?”

4.) At a reading in Los Angeles, a man in a wheelchair asked me to sign his copy of:

a.) The Violence of Childbirth
b.) The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
c.) Man With A Shattered World: History of a Brain Wound
d.) Acoustic Theory of Speech Production With Calculations Based on X-Ray Studies of Russian Articulations

5.) While running in the watershed woods in NC this past June, I saw

a.) Three bear cubs climbing a tree
b.) A mailman passed out in his truck
c.) A turtle
d.) A turkey
e.) Professor Trottelreiner
f.) A, B, C, D

6.) This year I encountered:

a.) A guy who wants to build a vocoder out of bamboo and snot
b.) A woman who wants to build a vocoder out of glass
c.) A civil war submarine engineer who wants to build a subwoofer out of HP Lovecraft’s skull, which had been disinterred while on moonshine in Providence and now allegedly sits on a friend’s coffee table in Atlanta.
d.) All of the above

7.) In Little Toni Marsh’s “Video Burnout,” the vocoder says:

a.) “Where do you go when the arcade’s closed?”
b.) “There’s an RV up my nose.”
c.) “Where’s my Arby’s Rump Roast Boat?”

8.) My brother’s high school band was called:

a.) Cousin Ito & the Salivating Spleens
b.) Get Them Guts Outta My Yard
c.) Eraser In-law
d.) Wrong Name Death Scream
e.) A & B
f.) All of the above

9.) When I spilled a beer on my laptop in 2005, I lost:

a.) The part where Man Parrish falls from the ceiling of Studio 54 and sprains his ankle while headlining over Madonna with a troupe of purple dwarves carrying lanterns
b.) The part where a can of tennis balls inhales all the unvoiced hiss energy at the 1980 US Open Men’s Final between Borg and McEnroe, including Henry Kissinger’s gnat-triggered sneeze on the third row
c.) My shit
d.) My religion
e.) My beer
f.) All of the above

10.) Match the following special effects provided by Mad magazine special effects specialist Don Martin.

a.) “Sitz sittzle sizzotz”
b.) “Ahh-ahh ahh THOONOONN!”
c.) “Voofen! Voofen!”
d.) “Skwappo!”
e.) “GEEN!”
f.) “Thiz ziz ziz ziz”

1. Plastic Man giving a guy on the 32nd Floor the finger
2. Spiderman’s secret web fluid backfiring
3. The Human Torch hugging his girlfriend
4. Iron Man sneezing inside his iron mask
5. The Katzenjammer Kids’ dog barking at them in German
6. The Silver Surfer wiping out on a meteor

11.) Amazon called How to Wreck a Nice Beach:

a.) “Entertainment Book of the Year”
b.) “An edutaining pain in the ass.”
c.) “A book whose sales ranking is equidistant to the miles separating Earth and the Pac Man Nebula, as calculated by a Mayan algorithm.”

12.) I was going to call my book:

a.) So To Speak
b.) I Have No Vocoder and I Must Scream
c.) Frog & Toad Don’t Care
d.) Technically Speaking
e.) Hard To Tell
f.) All of the above

True/False:

13. When I told Florian Schneider about the dragon with the Voder around his neck in Robert Heinlein’s Between the Planets, he said I should stop indulging in childish fantasies and get back to serious research.







14. The first book cover was to be an illustration of William Rehnquist’s neck, with the stoma strung like a Bancroft Bjorn Borg tennis racquet, and the title stenciled across the catgut grid, through which tiny—and perhaps poisonous—blue toads are peeping. Rendered in pencil.

15. Stuart Gordon, director of Re-Animator, owns a copy of How to Wreck a Nice Beach.

16. The vocoder in DJ Hero 2 is not really a vocoder.

17. The programmer behind the “I Am T-Pain” app attended the Princeton reading and left.

18. Snoop Dogg owns a copy of How to Wreck a Nice Beach.

19. On January 4th, 2010, I emailed the following to my editor: “Holy shit! Make that a holy shit and a holy shit!”

20. On January 4th, 2010, I emailed my final editorial change.



BONUS!
21. I’m DJing the Mega-Gate Super Bowl Party in Vegas, sponsored by the National Tailgating Federation.



(1) h (2) a (3) a (4) a (5) f (6) d (7) a (8) e (9) f

(10) DON MARTIN ANSWERS
(a) 3 (b) 4 (c) 5 (d) 6 (e) 1 (f) 2

(11) a (12) f (13-19) True (20) False (21) Ulp!