vox electronix

I was playing some Boards of Canada recently & came across the song "In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country." I love the use of the vocoder in that tune. Being a sci-fi geek & an electronic music dork, it makes sense that I would like songs with vocoders. So I set out to find enough vocoder tunes for a mix. The result is "Vox Electronix". The vocoder is is an analysis/synthesis system, developed in the 1930's, that dramatically reduces the amount of information needed to store speech, from a complete recording to a series of numbers. Because much info was lost in the encoding & decoding process, the voice ended up sounding "dehumanized" or robot-like. Eventually changes were made by people like Wendy Carlos & Robert Moog, that made the vocoder a musical device, used most prominently by artists like Kraftwerk. The vocoder is used in many of the tracks in this mix, but I'm not exactly sure which ones are vocoder & which ones are auto-tune and which ones are just clever vocal manipulation. So don't everyone go crazy saying "hey that's not a flippin' vocoder!" I was just going for a certain sound, a certain feel. It was cool discovering tunes I'd either never heard of or forgotten about. Thanks to Judd at the Hypnos forum for recommending the tune by Tonto's Expanding Head Band & for reminding me about the track from the U2/Eno collaboration, Passengers. Also thanks to False mirror on the Hypnos forum for the heads up on the Robert Rich song. That's one of those that I think is some form of auto-tune versus a vocoder. The mix opens with a cool bit of audio which was recorded at Bell Labs in 1936. This was a fun mix to put together, discovering new tunes & revisiting old favorites(O Superman). I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. T R A C K L I S T : 00:00 Bell Labs 1936 - Voice of Power 00:23 Tonto's Expanding Head Band - Riversong 03:33 Brian Eno - And then so clear 08:15 Boards of Canada - In a beautiful place out in the country 12:30 Air - le soleil est pres de moi 16:30 Apples in Stereo - Vocoder ba ba 16:45 Bjork - Possible Maybe(Lucy mix) 19:30 Passengers - A different kind of blue 21:10 Robert Rich - Premonition of circular clouds 28:25 Laurie Anderson - O Superman 35:40 Ricardo Villalobos - Easy Lee 39:45 Trans Am - Futureworld 42:33 Air - Sexy Boy 47:30 Peter Baumann - This This Day 51:54 Apples in Stereo - Hello Lola 52:10 Black Moth Super Rainbow - Twins of Myself 55:15 Holger Czukay - Ode to Perfume 59:15 Brian Eno - Bottomliners 03:04 end