Lord Of The Ring Modulators

Joe Byrd, Dorothy Moskowitz and the advent of psych electronica

Tamara de Lempicka - composition abstraite c 1955

In the mid-'60s, a synthesizer was considered an instrument on its own terms, not a means of duplicating the sound of something else.  It expanded the palette and gave the music a dangerous edge. I have no regrets about the electronic excess under which my voice was buried. It was part of the aesthetic and I was the one who insisted on singing through a ring modulator.
– Dorothy Moskowitz


If you move in the same intersectional internet music spaces as me, you might have noticed that last week’s cause célèbre resulted from a mistake at the pressing plant, or perhaps some Banskian act of agit-pop sabotage, whereby the coloured vinyl pressing of the new Taylor Swift atrocity Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), another rerecording of already well-rewarded work, was revealed to be, when played, Happy Land: A Compendium of Electronic Music from the British Isles 1992-1996 (Vol 1), a new 2-LP compilation of UK electronica from the late 20^th century. Cabaret Voltaire, Robert Wyatt, that sort of thing (which seems to me like exactly the music that Banksy would have chosen had this been his gesture, but anyway). Certainly not Ramleh or Psychic TV.
Swifty Rachel Hunter ran through her impressions on Tik Tok, quoted by Daniel Dylan Wray in The Guardian:

True Romance by Thunderhead was the first thing Hunter heard when she played the record. “I thought maybe the vinyl had some sort of special message,” she says. “Because Taylor does that sort of thing. This voice [Eden, in flat American tones] was saying strange things about flesh and anxiety. I was like: this is weird. I thought maybe the other side would be less strange but I flipped it over [to Cabaret Voltaire] and, no, it only got weirder.”

The comments under the video run into the thousands. Words such as “scary”, “terrifying” and “haunted” are plentiful. Released as Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), record has quickly been nicknamed (Cursed Version). But plenty are calling it “fire” and digging Cabaret Voltaire, including Hunter. “I was like: this is so creepy,” she says. “But when the beat kicks in I was like: this is a vibe.”

Since the singularity, hipsters have been buying up Taylor Swift vinyl in the hope of scoring the (Cursed Version) and people have been mashing up Swift songs with old UK electronica for a thrill. (Allegedly, because I can’t find “Cabaret Voltaylor”  on the streamers and looking too hard for a Swift-Voltaire mashup risks asking some AI search-bot to cut-up-and-paste reams of bilingual 18^th century satire).
I’m not a Taylor Swift fan – she strikes me as a dreadful music vampire of the same undead lineage as Ed Sheeran, using great wealth and industrial resources to mine every new, interesting or meaningful idea out of the culture and into her pop ATM, usually about 10 years after Lana has blessed them. She’s welcome to do the same to those Thunderhead or Cabaret Voltaire tracks which, as proto-EDM, are done already, and I think Robert Wyatt and Ultramarine’s “Happy Land” should be safe in its pointed tweeness.

But the concept uncovered by this act of God or Banksy, that the pop female voice and the darkest undercurrents of electronica somehow deserve each other, are fated to belong together? The music you’ve all begun to imagine after reading the (Cursed Version) story already exists (and as we’ll see, like most things, it started in the Summer of Love).

I’ve written before about indie J-pop producer 4s4ki – “SILENT”, from this week’s album CODE GE4SS, along with the title track and “Black Rebellion”, showing one direction our (Cursed Version) playlist can take, 4s4ki pushing her mad producer skills to the edge:

Yet other tracks on CODE GE4SS were obviously ballads in another life; 4s4ki says she’s a fan of Adele, which would be alarming in an English-language singer who didn’t electronically treat her voice in such imaginative ways, but which explains why her music is more ambitious in its emotional range than the other hyperpop I’ve come across.
The ballads often use real guitars, and the occasional digitised use of non-digital instruments, especially guitars and drums, alongside synths, bass synths, digital percussion and vocal software, is something that separates this music I speak of from more purely electronic concerns, and gives it some distant, imagined connection to rock’n’roll.

IC3PEAK, whom I introduced last week, give us something almost Swiftian in “м​к​А​Д”, (“mkAD”, the Moscow ring road) from 2020’s До свидания (Do svidaniya, “Goodbye”) – shake this off if you can.

Oh, it smells like guts here
He’s found dead in his bed
He didn’t steal the gun
He borrowed it from his Dad
Ouch, his face is like a piecе of meat
I’ll throw his body under the bridgе
He wears a wedding ring
It will go to the bottom with him

You buried me beyond the Moscow ring road
You fed me up with dirt
But I got out from this hell
And came back for you
You said you loved me
Promised me we’d always be together
I knew that one day you would destroy me
Now all I want is your soul

Jockstrap, a duo I first heard recommended in a Cathal Coughlan interview a few years ago, are an exception to the “internet music” rule, with decent record company support, the respect of credentialed critics, and a vinyl release for I Love You Jennifer B which you can even buy in Flying Out. Maybe because it’s less gothic than my other choices, but it’s the same kind of thing – a woman singing about her own ideas, over fantastic and genre-defying beats, complex synth arrangements, occasional tweaked guitar, and with poignant vocal treatments. The first Jockstrap song I heard is called “Hayley”, just like my Hayley.

2020’s “City Hell ($TAYLA$ CLUB MIX)” is an in-house remix that reminds me of the fairy trap style minted by Zheani, an Australian artist whose I Hate People On The Internet was my favourite album of 2022 (I reviewed it here) and who, of all these musicians has had the most to say and has said it across the widest range of production styles. Her most recent release, “Pathetic Waste”, is, at just 2 minutes 5 seconds long, probably the first ballad she’s written, and, though it would be just as catchy, and equally moving, played on the piano with one finger, sounds on first listen like it was recorded in the reactor room at Chernobyl in 1986, due to an intricately gritty production by VenesiaWorld who gets a rare writing co-credit. Note the full use of autotune, Zheani hitting it as hard as she can, though short of full-on screaming into it as she did to brilliant effect on 2020’s Deconstrukto-produced “Brave New World”, her attack on the internet-as-it-is, the mob-ruled technocratic environment these new artists are struggling and evolving in, like creatures in some neo-Darwinian experiment. Its lyric involves us in cryptic repetition, rich and almost careless literary Symbolism, and rapper truth-bombs.

Load up on fun shit
And kill your friendships
It’s fun to hate shit
That’s pretty - break it

VenesiaWorld’s own music would seem to be my next rabbithole - to find an artist who seems real and see who they’ve collaborated with, who’s on their playlist, is the best way I’ve found to navigate through the shoals of fake payola’d new music that the algorithms would rather you foundered on.¹

The tracks above are just side 1 of the double I’d be substituting, for not only Taylor Swift’s double but also 1990’s UK proto-EDM electronica set, if I were Banksy.

Just as the computing device you read these words on would once have filled a city block, so would the analogue equivalent of your Garageband or Soundtrap app. The first electronically composed music was the product of workers like Delia Derbyshire (creator in 1963 of the theme from Doctor Who) in the laboratories of large broadcasters like the BBC, or modernist composers at well-endowed universities, or boffins for the tech companies designing new musical instruments and sound systems. And, as far as I know, the first people to put electronica behind, and around, the female voice were Joe Byrd and Dorothy Moskowitz.

Byrd, the sleeve notes to The American Metaphysical Circus inform me, was “a descendant of the famous Byrd family of Virginia” who grew up in Tuscon Arizona. A vibe player in jazz bands, on graduation from Arizona University he received Stanford University’s Sollnit Fellowship to study composition, but choose to split for New York “where he had already begun listening to electronic music, and meeting young, far-out Berkely experimental composers”. He worked as an assistant to critic-composer Virgil Thompson, probably most often mentioned today as one of William Grant Still’s mentors alongside Edgard Varèse, and as an Associate Producer (the words are capitalized in the sleevenotes) for an unnamed record company. The New York Times described a 1962 Carnegie Hall recital of his music as a "thimbleful of tiny sounds" that were "generally just this side of the threshold of inaudibility."

Around this time Byrd met Dorothy Moskowitz and moved to the West Coast with her. At UCLA, Byrd studied acoustics, psychology and Indian music, living in a beachfront commune with other faculty, students, and Indian musicians, before dropping out in 1967 to become a full-time experimental composer and happening-producer. In 1965, at the close of a series of concerts and happenings called "Steamed Spring Vegetable Pie" (a title taken at random from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook), Byrd organized a blues band fronted by his friend Linda Ronstadt, later saying  “the realization that rock was an access to a larger public came out of that concert, and the idea of forming a band began taking shape”. This band would become the short-lived electronics-based psych rock act The United States of America (the sense of American identity throughout Byrd’s music reminds me of Charles Ives, transposed to a counter-culture Leftist “American anti-Americanism” frame).

Wiki says that the U.S.A.’s synths, ring modulators etc were built by Tom Oberheim, who later built the Oberheim DMX or OB-Xa synths used on Run DMC and Van Halen hits in the 80’s, but Oberheim himself has a different take on this:

“[Byrd] had a girlfriend named Dorothy, and after I finished my degree, I went off to do computer engineering, and he started this band called United States of America. They lasted less than one year, they made two records, and the band wasn’t so interesting, but the people were interesting, so that’s kind of that story. Oh, and the most important part of that story is that the original band broke up because they always fought. I know nowadays you don’t fight and everybody’s very happy, but in those days these people fought and they broke up the band and the singer started the band again with different people. In the original band, there was a device called a ring modulator, which was designed by some guy I never met. When the band broke up he took his ring modulator and went, so when she started the band again, she came to me because she knew I was an engineer and she said: “Build me a ring modulator.”

the ring modulator

Well, I had no idea what it was.² But by then I’d been a computer engineer for six or seven years, so I went to the UCLA library, and spent several hours looking through the books, and I found this book that had this circuit diagram in it. I couldn’t figure out why this circuit would be of interest to a musician, but anyway, I kept on looking. And finally, I found an article from a magazine from 1960, where a famous engineer [Harald Bode] who was originally from Germany and who moved to America in the 1930s and designed organs, he started designing some stuff to make electronic music, even before Moog did. He designed a modular – it wasn’t a synthesizer – but he designed a modular electronic music system, and one of the things he had there was a ring modulator, and he explained what a ring modulator was and how you could use it for music.”

This doesn’t make complete sense, as the United States of America only made one album, and Dorothy Moskowitz later sang straight with Country Joe, while Byrd’s next album project, the Field Hippies, featured other singers. My best explanation is that Moskowitz wanted her own ring modulator while the band was still active. A fighting band, in the tradition of The Shadows, or The Fall and King Loser, the last of the fighting bands, their mood can’t have been helped by the temperamental nature of early electronic instruments and the way electronic sounds had to be laid down one-by-one on 8 track tape to make the album – which for all that, is a complex and fascinating thing and has overall aged well.³ On The United States Of America, the synths and modulators are accompanied by bass and drums, often treated, on the rocky tracks – the bass synth hadn’t been invented, nor the plausible drum machine. The album’s highlights are the sparkling, reeling “Coming Down”, where Dorothy talks us down from some massive LSD excursion (the first verse lyric is Byrd’s, the rest are hers).

I think it's over now, I think it's ending
I think it's over now, I think it's ending

There is sometimes a later secondary phase
It's not unusual for it to last for days
And everything is magnified when it is gone

Reality is only temporary
Reality is only temporary

A process imitating things that went before
Without a satisfying answer anymore
The present just repeats the future and the past

There is no time for second answers to the past
If yesterday is gone don't try to make it last
And summer winds have come and gone without a flood

A thought of coloured clouds all high above my head
A trip that doesn't need a ticket or a bed
And everything is smelling sweeter than a rose


And the following track “Love Song For The Dead Che”, a sweet song, in a setting like a tropical forest dripping from rain in the sunlight.

At the dawn of an ordinary Sunday
I remember the taste of you, sweet in my mouth
Late in the year
And in the stillness of the Oriente rainfall
I remember the warmth of you, still in my arms
Late, late in the year

The final cut features sections of the previous songs marching past and interacting with each other, again very much in the style of Charles Ives.

At a gig in Orange County, Joe and Dorothy had to complete their set with the help of the support act when the other three members of the band were busted for possession of marijuana, spelling the end of The United States of America. Joe Byrd’s next album project, Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies’ The American Metaphysical Circus, uses a larger group of musicians and more conventional instruments (Tom Scott of LA Express on saxes, clarinet and flute is the only name I recognize). It’s the first section, three interlinked tracks, called “Sub-Sylvian Litanies”, that seems to develop the electronic ideas of The United States Of America best.

In “Kalyani” Victoria Bond’s voice is electronically treated, and out-of-phase at first, singing the first line, “waiting to die”, of Byrd’s “You Can’t Ever Come Down”, sung by Susan de Lange, which is a harsher trip than Dorothy’s “Coming Down”:

Waiting to die for the seventeenth time
Etched on a mirror in back of your mind
Trapped on a mountain nobody can climb

You can't ever come down

Try to remember the shape of your name
Where did you go when they started the game?
How did the sand get inside of your brain?

You can't ever come down

A bad trip, mercifully calmed by “Moonsong Pelog”.⁴

Come down, baby,
Come down easy
Onto your lady's satin pillow.

Come in, lover,
Come in softly,
Into your lady's warm and louvered chamber.

Come fly with me.
Come fly with me.
Come die with me.

There’s a line somewhere in Marx or Engels that describes how it’s naturally going to be the bourgeoisie who’ll have the wealth and leisure to explore those ideas which later develop human potential in all classes. As writers and thinkers of course, but also as the first adopters of initially expensive technologies. These include labour-saving devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, without which many of you would have no time to read these words (and I would have no time to write them), but also the means of artistic production. And today’s example is the patrician Joseph Byrd and the Barnard-educated Dorothy Moskowitz accelerating, over half a century ago, the development and commercial use of analogue technologies that foreshadowed modern digital tools for the expression of autodidact lumpenprole genius.

.Algorithmic humanoid suggestion: Nico, “My Heart Is Empty”

1. Does anyone make good internet music in New Zealand? As I’ve said before, P.H.F. absolutely nailed the hyperpop ballad sound on Purest Hell, and there’s often a correlation between i.e.crazy’s art music and the darker sounds I like, indeed listening to Non Compos Mentis in 2015 may have helped to form my taste. But Half Hexagon, who surely had the resources to make something extraordinary, gave us instead a safe homage to well-accepted 20th c sounds to justify Mark Fisher’s lament. So much of what we call “experimental music” in this country is vapid noodling hiding under the see-through umbrella of “coolness”. Prove me wrong.

2. A ring modulator was used by the BBC technicians to create the voice of the Daleks in 1963; it’s called a ring modulator because in the original design 4 diodes were set in a ring, as shown in the circuit diagram.

3. According to Moskowitz, when Nico left the Velvet Underground she asked to join the United States Of America. It probably didn’t help her case that the VU had pushed the U.S.A.’s amps over on leaving the stage the one time the two bands played a gig together, or that Nico wasn’t all that interested in Marxism, or that Joe Byrd had his hands full already controlling the strong-willed band that his politics obliged him to treat as a democracy. But I consider Nico a precursor to some of the modern acts I’ve discussed here, and it’s nice to know she had similar instincts.

4. The synthesizer on “Moonsong Pelog” is picking out a pentatonic melody in tones that remind me of Percy Grainger’s setting of Debussy’s “Pagodes” for an orchestra that included wooden percussion instruments of his own design.