How to Wreck a Nice Beach

"Dave Tompkins heads over to NYC’s Big City Records to share some of his favorite albums that utilised the vocoder and a bit of the strange history behind the device’s creation and rise in popularity." From Crate Kings/FaderTV.




Tompkins’s recent book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, which is available now, thru Stop Smiling Books (the folk behind the excellent Stop Smiling magazine, one of my favourite mags on the planet - shame its defunct).

"This is the story of how a military device became the robot voice of hip-hop and pop music. Though the vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, was designed to guard phones from eavesdroppers, it expanded beyond its original purpose and has since become widely used as a voice-altering tool for musicians. It has served both the Pentagon and the roller rink, a double agent of pop and espionage.

In How to Wreck a Nice Beach—from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech”—music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from Manhattan nightclubs to the Muppets." Source.