CYRNAI

KEYBOARD

Cyrnai’s latest, Transfiguration (Titanium), fuses diverse electronic styles, and is supplemented by 80 pages of surreal prose and painting. For music that seems uncategorizable, she devises her own designation: a “musaic,” a non-linear artform “where all senses dominate. So if I were to subtract one from the other, I wouldn’t function correctly. The boundaries essentially overlap, and they all have layers and mood, and they also compliment each other.” The release deserves to be called an original for that reason alone. Yet the music intrigues, meshing elements of techno, ambient, and even gothic. The San Francisco-based artist has been working under this pseudonym for over a decade. “I first invented it as a way to understand the darker side of my thoughts,” she explains. Her real name and persona, Carolyn Fok, represents “the brighter half of my self. Cyrnai is basically things I can’t explain, things I wonder about life, and wondering about the two sides of our consciousness.” While dreams are the chief inspiration for her work, her diversity also stems from the wide range of art she imbibes, whether it’s Cabaret Voltaire (her biggest musical influence), Chopin, Bowie, Hong Kong disco, the films of John Woo, the art of Dali, or the animation of Tim Burton. Cyrnai’s instruments for the album included (among others) a Roland JD-800, TB-303, and D-20, Sequential Prophet-VS rack, Yamaha DX7, Synclavier, Ensoniq KS-32, and an SMS Frequency module. The synthetic elements were balanced with some organic ones, including live vocals, Chinese and distorted guitar, strings, and drums. Her processors included the Eventide H-3000 Ultraharmonizer, Dynacord DRP 20 Digital Reverb, Lexicon 200, Sony DPS-D7 and -R7, Roland DEP-5, dbx 500 Sub-Harmonic Synthesizer, and Aphex Dominator II. Her myriad sounds come from different sources: Many instrumental tracks were sampled from musicians – notably guitarist/bassist Elliot Sharp and guitarist John Myers – who improvised live over a click track. “I have at least three gigs of sounds that I sampled myself,” she tells us. Some of the unusual audio came about by accident. One involved a glitch in SampleCell. “When all the sounds were fully loaded in banks, I closed the program,” she recalls. When I opened them again, all the sounds from the two SampleCells played at once, creating a long loud string of bleeps and demented digital voices, which I sampled with my Sony DAT machine.” Cyrnai’s choice of audio software was also wide-ranging: Opcode Studio Vision on the Mac, Digidesign’s Sound Designer II and Turbosynth, and Passport’s Alchemy. She also used a creation of her own. “I conceived of a software program called Robotic Editor, which is auto-truncating software, “she says. Robotic Editor was programmed by Tim Niemi (known for his synth programming on NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine, he also provided some synth sound design on this album). The software is used to “edit long strings of individual samples and drop them into designated folders.” With all this modern technology, it’s unusual to note that the album was actually done on a Mac II, although the composer recently upgraded her computing hardware to a Mac 9500. Cyrnai describes Transfiguration as a work of “autobiographical fiction,” where personal scenes from her life are transformed into an artistic work that others can relate to. She finds the title appropriate as the album “starts out as songs and transforms into instrumentals,” giving the work the feeling of a journey, one well worth taking. – Bryan Reesman

THE INDUSTRIAL BIBLE

Released in 1996, this CD is just 1/2 of all that encompasses Transfiguration. The cd comes packaged with an 80 page booklet containing artwork and text that takes you on a journey of “spiritual transformation.’  The entire project is based on actual documented dreams that occurred between 1984 and 1996. The music behind Transfiguration is of the experimental type, yet it is light and somewhat danceable. On certain tracks there is a slight similarity to gothic in the vocals. Electric Sanctuary is a compelling composition with a screeching background rhythm and 1/2 spoken vocals. For the most part, this track is on the mellow side, yet the beat and electronics have tendency to lean towards the dancey side. The title track is an experimental instrumental with smattering of gothic overtones in the keys. DIgital Grit Box is a straight edged electro piece with rhythms akin to A Split Second and percussion much like Test Dept. LoveSexDesire takes the same electro, but sends it back in time, resulting is a piece with music that is reminiscent of the mid-80’s synth-pop movement. Is This A Dream contains ambient sequences, militaristic beats, and ethereal vocals. The church organ styled synths and acoustic guitar chords in In My Winter are rather gothic in nature. Cyrnai’s vocal delivery, which is mixed to the front, is extremely strong on this particular track. Unfortunately I did not receive the booklet with this CD, so I can’t go into exactly what it holds, but if it is anywhere near as impressive as the music on the CD, I just might have to track one down.

INDUSTRIAL NATION -Issue 15

KYron

Combining visual art, prose, poetry, and music, New York artist Carolyn Fok, or Cyrnai, delivers Transfiguration, a book/CD exploring its namestake. At sixteen chapters, eleven paintings, and fourteen songs, Transfiguration is an evolution of both Cyrnai’s work and of an album’s contents. Although the book portion of this release is beautiful, it’s not vital to understanding the music, unlike th paintings, which are integral to the text’s meaning. However, Cyrnai’s artistic enlightenment, documented through the combined text and music, fully unifies visual and sonic components of Transfiguration. In the aural realm, Transfiguration’s electronic atmospherics weave between gradual understanding, startling visions, and dense conflict, Cyrnai’s voice connecting dispersed meaning and rooting the music to its source. Musically, Cyrnai is not afraid of where her enlightenment is taking her. The question is, how deep are we listening?

At sixteen chapters, eleven paintings, and fourteen songs, Transfiguration is an evolution of both Cyrnai’s work and of an album’s contents.  Cyrnai’s artistic enlightenment, documented through the combined text and music, fully unifies visual and sonic components of Transfiguration.  In the aural realm, Transfiguration’s electronic atmospheres weave between gradual understanding, startling visions, and dense conflict, Cyrnai’s voice connecting dispersed meaning and rooting the music to its source.  Musically, Cyrnai is not afraid of where her enlightenment may lead her.  The question is, are we listening?

INTERFACE MAGAZINE – Electronic music and art

version 4.1 

-Feature- by Andy Waggoner

Cyrnai is the pseudonym for multimedia artist Carolyn Fok, who is truly representative of the quintessential Renaissance man, er person. In the nineties. Not only is she obviously not a man, but as an artist, she is not simply an artist either. An accomplished painter, musician and writer, Fok has a lot of work in many different media and in several mediums at once in many cases. In addition to her creative work, she runs an independant label, Titanium, which released Transfiguration  from her alter-ego. Artist, business person, musician; Fok wears many masks. The true mark of the new renaissance.

Transfiguration  itself is the culmination of writings, paintings, and music from life experiences captured into Fok’s diaries. Her experiences  transferred to her diaries gave the artist Cyrnai fodder for creation. It also gave Fok an outlet and a method to deal with  experiences when she was growing up. When she was young, she moved every two years and went from family turmoils to guitar recitals at Christian schools. From near death experiences to traveling to Hong Kong to win awards for her oil paintings.  “My first memory is of my father throwing glass down on the floor and taking me away in a car. This was my first journey into the abyss.”  A lot of unsteadiness in a young person’s life to be sure. Fok found that steadiness in her art, music and writing. Devoting time and energy into her creativity was an excellent method of catharsis. Her discipline and talent has brought her recognition that was probably never intended when she sought refuge in her art, but is a necessary consequence of creating excellent work.

At the very core of Carolyn Fok’s work is the constant message of duality. The person and the artist, the artist and the art, the music and the musician. Within one being, there is the woman Carolyn Fok. A graduate of San Francisco Academy of Art and an accomplished artist and performer. As a painter, she has shown in galleries from San Francisco to Hong Kong. There is also Cyrnai, the performer, the figure, a former member of Rhythm & Noise, a collective of sculptors, musicians, and other artists that is like a cross between Survival Research Laboratories and Germany’s Missing Foundation, and who has collaborated with notorious musicians from various camps.

Fok got started with her solo career in 1985 when she was just 18 years old. That was when Charred Blossoms  was released under the name Cyrnai. But even before that release, Fok had already been performing with several punk and industrial bands in San Francisco. After Charred Blossoms received numerous critical acclaimations, Fok associated with new music entities such as Negativland and Elliott Sharp. And then in 1989, Fok joined Rhythm & Noise, a music and art collective that survived with their performances. Rhythm & Noise brought together junk sculpture, experimental electronic music and performance art. Fok’s role as music sequencer and programmer gave her plenty of experience to couple with her studies at San Francisco Academy of Art.

Fok has been working with music since a young age and has been combining mediums into unified artwork since. Only recently, Fok points out, “has combining mediums become more of a cutting edge thing to do. If I were to just work in only one medium, due to compartmentalization in society’s structure (in the market), I would really be dividing myself up. I think it’s basically impossible for me not to do them all. They basically transfer in and out of each other.” It has become easier to package CDs with more interesting and creative options from the physical containers to the ability to add in digital information in addition to the music. These options are giving artists like Fok who have been working in these varied media to be able to work on them together in a unified concept and give themselves an outlet for every way they create.

On Transfiguration, under the moniker of Cyrnai.  Fok likes these elements of her creativity and combines them into one element.  This schizophrenic release features an 80 page booklet with drawings, poems, stories and lyrics that comes with the CD full of eclectic electronic music shows these many sides of Fok’s talents.  Employing help from Sharp and others, Transfiguration  is a work of no little importance.  Much more than a simple art project, but a complete thought and finished work.

Over the past ten years of working with people in music as well as with her own writings and her paintings, this was, as Fok says, “a bubble waiting to burst.”  The bubble did indeed burst.  While the art is credited to Carolyn Fok and the writings and music to Cyrnai, the person that is both is the real champion.  While she doesn’t want to focus on the fact that she is a solitary woman creating this art, but only that she is an artist above all else.  As an artist she finds it as a way to transcend human nature and speaks on how she has worked out these concepts in isolation for about ten years.  She never realized that it was a hardship for women to stake out on their own and create projects like this.  Her naivity allowed her to simply do it.  She was not attempting to conquer the challenges that are unfortunately still present for women, only was simply pursuing creation as an artist.  Regardless of gender, her work focuses on human nature more than anything.  Many concepts in her art involve more philosophical precepts that don’t cater to any gender, only to humans as a whole.

“Human existence is a polarity, a cycle between these god-like sides, like a yin and a yang.  To delve into the depths of both, you can transcend the belief system between heaven and hell or the polarity of religion.  To be able to not limit yourself to either side.  The balance between the two is, in a way, full control.”

Where she is going in the future.  Fok/Cyrnai wouldn’t share, wanting to keep it a surprise, but she did give us some hints.  The forthcoming remix album will be called Transmix  and there will probably be some digital multimedia work coming.  Never one to stick to only one medium, Fok has taken her work even further into the digital domain by way of various 2-D and 3-D software programs.  Expect nothing short of incredible from that avenue of her art.  -Andy Waggoner.

NEW INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS

No. 5 Vol.2

Here we have a multimedia project: an 80 page booklet plus a full length CD. The soundscapes are slickly produced; there’s real talent and depth in Cyrnai’s electronic music. It’s seductive, intriguing (as are the dreamy narratives and paintings accompanying the CD), and familiar (of NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine and European electro). It wouldn’t be surprising to see her composing music for future cybernetic movies or for adult radio play.

SONIC BOOM

How does one describe an artist who has worked with a variety of industrial and noise artists for over a decade, but has never really been recognized or noticed by anyone? Cyrnai has been working with such diverse artists as Brian Ladd of Blackhouse and Elliott Sharp of Carbon, and has been a member of four distinctly different bands, ranging from punk, gothic, noise and industrial genres since 1981. Yet, until I received this album in the mail, I wasn’t even aware she existed. Musically this solo effort, with the help of a few guests, is a collection of totally electronic pieces that range from dance tunes, sample collages, and, odd technoish pieces. The only guitars you are going to hear will be muted samples, distorted beyond recognition and clarity. Cyrnai also perfoms all of her own vocal work which ranges from chanting, spoken word, to more traditional methods. The CD also comes with an eighty page companion book which documents dreams that the artist herself has experienced since 1982. Overall a very solid release by a previously unknown artist, who apparently has been sitting quietly in the background gauging for the right moment to pounce upon the musical world in all her splendid talent.

ELECTRONIC MUSICIAN, February 1997

NY composer cyrnai (with guitarist Elliott Sharp) uses Opcode’s Studio Vision to trigger techno rhythms…

OPTION

The ambition of this release is a little overwhelming. The combination of music (played, sung, composed and arranged by the artist), together with a thick booklet of her visual art, written dream visions and stories, could have turned out to be little more than a monument to artistic ego. Fortunately, Cyrnai (Carolyn Fok) does seem to have an abundance of talent, both as a musician and painter. There’s a falling off only with the written material; the 100 raw dreamscapes are rich in imagery and situations, but when they are shaped into more formal stories, the narratives become obscured by a haze of convoluted verbiage, eg., “Was I here as to satisfy the glow running to disassemble? Let the question disappear and use invisible ink to store the secret of asking.” However, Cyrnai’s musical sense is first rate. Her style might be described, imprecisely, as feminine industrial. Her voice communicates both menace and promise, and her instrumental support is hard-edged, percussive techno with a lyrical center. Compositions are carefully arranged, complex and compelling. Dissonant, languid synth strings are played against powerful metallic rhythms; nightmare electronic sound collages are mixed with cathedral organ and druggy, processed vocals. To some extent, Cyrnai’s music appears to be an aural counterpart of her paintings, which are haunting, open-ended passages into (or out of) fragmented landscapes composed of pastel flowers, roadways, forests, skyscrapers, inscrutable machinery and transparent human figures. Given current studio technology, it’s easy to produce vaguely psychedelic effects in music and pass them off as profundity, but it takes a superior artist, with a commitment to psychic and sonic exploration, to use these tools creatively.

-Bill Tilland

COVER Volume 11, Number 1 Feb/March, 1997
“Transfiguration” CD/Book (Titanium)

Combining visual art, prose, and poetry and music, New York artist Caroline Fok, or Cyrnai, delivers Transfiguration, a book/CD exploring its namesake. At sixteen chapters, eleven paintings, and fourteen songs, this is an evolution of both Cyrnai’s work and of an album’s contents. Although the book portion of this release is beautiful, it’s not vital to understanding the music, unlike the paintings, which are integral to the text’s meaning. Electronic atmospherics weave between gradual understanding, startling visions and dense conflict. Cyrnai’s voice connects dispersed meanings, rooting the music to its source.

-Sharon Maher

MAGNET #27 February/March 1997
“Transfiguration” CD/Book (Titanium)

Multi-instrumentalist Cyrnai takes a wide range of familiar electronic sounds and imbues them with new life, courtesy of her fertile imagination. The futuristic Transfiguration offers an atmospheric exploration of electronic spaces, which is simultaneously avant-garde yet accessible, obscure yet distinct. That this ambitious LP is hard to describe is a testament to its originality. It features some guest musicians, including Elliott Sharp, and is beautifully packaged with an 80-page book featuring Cyrnai’s prose and paintings. One of the best tunes is “Electric Sanctuary,” an unusual, experimental techno work that juxtaposes airy vocals with interlocking programmed rhythms, wailing electric guitar and odd effects. It’s a continually unfolding piece, indicative of much of the album, which often shirks conventional structures in favor of changing, cyclical approach. Transfiguration explores many textures and sonic ideas, moving between techno, ambient and other electronic forums and often mutating and blending them. Cyrnai toys with flanged vocals that sometimes sound both human and robotic, an effect that meshes well with the music. The album consistently presents intriguing songs: “Heart Of Ice” is a bubbling techno creation that glides along smoothly at its own pace; the soothing synthetics of “Sparks” set tranquil chords against lightly percolating noises; “In My Winter” glistens with cascading keyboard work; and “SIlent Station” showcases a more gothic-techno angle. A couple of the tunes don’t quite match up to the album’s standards, but who cares?

CULTURE SHOCK
Titanium’s release of Cyrnai’s Transfiguration is absolutely the most impressive first release we’ve ever seen from any label. It’s a beautiful 80 page book that comes packaged with a CD that is basically the dark, emotive, minimalistic, soundtrack. Though this is Titanium’s first release, Cyrnai is by no means a new-comer. Over the past 15 years, she’s worked alone and with the likes of (in bands) Psychic TV, Swans, and even Dead Kennedys! This label is world class, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.”

FREQUENCY PROJECT (ONLINE)
Cyrnai Transfiguration / TITANIUM is certainly one of the most interesting releases to come out in a while. Released as a combination 80 page book complete with this 14 track CD, Titanium is the result of multi-talented Carolyn Fok, who has worked with Psychic TV, the Swans, Trial, and A State Of Mind. The tracks are polished little electronic gems, with excellent programming behind them. The vocals serve as an extension of the psychosis, and are processed to fit perfectly with the music, which strikes me as a more ambient influenced new wave, although far darker. Percussion is superb, ranging from non-existent to tribal to dance floor, and blends well with the powerful bass synths present in most of the tracks. A fascinating release, it makes me want to look into her older work on Ladd-Frith.

BIKINI, May 1997
More an art project than a simple album, Transfiguration includes a CD, a book of Cyrnai’s paintings and drawings, and extracts drawn from her writings and dream journal. The entire package is the artist’s interpretation of transformation, emotional and spiritual. It’s a heady work, elaborate, insightful, and full of depth. The music is equally so, a mixture of electronic styles and moods that break down boundaries and barriers, transforming (or transfiguring) into surprisingly different aural shapes and sounds. Musically, Transfiguration can be best summed up as darkwave, though it pulls in fragments of industrial, new wave, techno, industrial dance, ethereal, as well. But while the music – created with the help of n.i.n.’s Tim Niemi, and guitarists Elliott Sharp and John Myers (of the Glenn Branca Ensemble) – has a dark core, there’s a lightness to much of the sound that defies both the genre and gravity itself, and Cyrnai herself soars, talks, and sings over it all. Few albums have such a strength of concept, and the rest of the package only drives home the depth of meaning and vision.

-Jo-Ann Greene

PERMISSION Issue 9, May, 1997
Tons of work have gone into putting together this release.Cyrnai is no stranger to the experimental music scene. I have heard her tracks on various compilations (she was a regular contributor to the Ladd-Frith compilation series) but I haven’t seen a full length release until now. This one provides hours of enjoyment because it comes complete with an 80 page color booklet–not the usual, say, 10 pages of lyrics and a brief essay on the history of band X. Cyrnai has included fiction pieces, fragments of a dream log, and full color illustrations in this booklet. An interesting place to get lost for a few hours! The accompanying CD provides a variety of musical styles without sounding like much that I’ve heard before. The CD is more like a collage of styles where none takes precedence; rather, each tack seems to compliment the one before and after it. Some tracks sound like they could easily become the next dance pop hit (“Digital Grit Box” or “LoveSexDesire”). Others show a more melodic side, aim more to soothe than to move (“Sparks”). Others show that Cyrnai has done her time in the studio and learned her way around all the electronic gizmos that some artists find alien (“Electric Sanctuary,” “StormMind”). This release definitely showcases the flexibility of one “underground” artist who has been around for quite a while.

INTERFACE
electronic music and art magazine
version 4.1-1997
feature by Andy Waggoner
Cyrnai Transfiguration

Cyrnai is the pseudonym for multimedia artist Carolyn Fok, who is truly representative of the quintessential Renaissance man, er, person. In the nineties. Not only is she obviously not a man, but as an artist, she is not simple an artist, either. An accomplished painter, musician and writer, Fok has a lot of work in many differnet media and in several mediums at once in many cases. In addition to her creative work, she runs an independant label, Titanium, which released Transfiguration from her alter-ego. Artist, business person, musician; Fok wears many masks. The true mark of the new renaissance.

Transfiguration itself is the culmination of writings, paintings and music from life experiences captured into Fok’s diaries. Her experiences transferred to her diaries give the artist Cyrnai fodder for creation. It also gave Fok an outlet and a method to deal with experiences when was growing up. When she was young, she moved every two years and went from family turmoil to guitar recitals at Christian schools. From near death experiences to traveling to Hong Kong to win awards for her oil paintings. “My first memory was of my father throwing glass down on the floor in anger and taking me away in a car. This was my first journey into the abyss.” A lot of unsteadiness in a young person’s life to be sure. Fok found that steadiness in her art, music, and writing. Devoting time and energy into creativity was an excellent method of catharsis. Her discipline and talent has brought her recognition that was probably never intended when she sought refuge in her art, but is a necessary consequence of creating excellent work.

At the very core of Carolyn Fok’s work is the constant message of duality. The person and the artist, the artist and the art, the music and musician. Within one being, there is the woman Carolyn Fok. A graduate of San Francisco Academy of Art as an illustrator and an accomplished artist and performer. As a painter, she has shown in galleries from San Francisco to Hong Kong. There is also Cyrnai, the performer, the figure, a former member of Rhythm & Noise, a collective of sculptors, musicians and other artists that is like a cross between Survival Research Laboratories and Germany’s Missing Foundation, and who has collaborated with notorious musicans from various camps.

Fok got started with her solo career in 1985 when she was just 18 years old. That was when Charred Blossoms was released under the name Cyrnai. But even before that release, Fok had already been performing with several punk and industrial bands in San Francisco. After Charred BLossoms received numerous critical acclaimations. Fok associated with Negativland, and Elliott Sharp. And then in 1989, Fok joined Rhythm & Noise, a music and art collective that survived with their performances, Rhythm & Noise brought together junk sculpture, experimental electronic music and performance art. Fok’s role as music sequencer and programmer gave her plenty of experience to couple with her studies at San Francisco Academy of Art.

Fok has been working with music since a young age and has been combining mediums into unified artwork since. Only recently, Fok points out, “has combing mediums become more of a cutting edge thing to do. If I were to just work in only one medium due to compartmentalized structures in the market, I would really be dividing myself up. I think it’s basically impossible for me to not to do them all. They basically transfer in and out of each other.” It has become easier to package CDs with more interesting and creative options from the physical containers to the ability to add in digital information in additon the the music. These options are giving artists like Fok who have been working in these varied media to be able to work on them together in a unified concept and give themselves an outlet for every way that they create.

On Transfiguration, under the moniker of Cyrnai, Fok takes these elements of her creativity and combines them into one element. This schizophrenic release features an 80 page booklet with drawings, poems, stories and lyrics that comes with the CD full of eclectic electronic music shows these many sides of Fok’s talents. Employing help from Sharp and others, Transfiguration is an upheaval of ingenuinity and uniqueness. This is much more than a single album, combining writing and painting with music. Transfiguration is a work of no little importance. Much more than a simple art project, but a complete thought and finished work.

Over the past ten years of working with people in music as well as with her own writings and her paintings, this was as Fok says, “a bubble waiting to burst.” The bubble did indeed burst. While the art is credited to Carolyn Fok and the writings and music to Cyrnai, the person that is both is the real champion. While she doesn’t want to focus on the fact that she is a solitary woman creating this art, but only that she is an artist above all else. As an artist she finds it as a way to transcend human nature and speaks on how she has worked out these concepts in isolation for about ten years. She never realized that it was a hardship for women to stake out on her own and create projects like this. Her naivity allowed her to simply do it. She was not attempting to conquer the challenges that are unfortunately are still present for women, only was simply pursuing creation as a artist. Regardless of gender, her work focuses on human nature more than anything. Many concepts in her art involve more philosophical percepts that don’t cater to any gender, only to humans as a whole.

“Human existance is a polarity, a cycle between these god-like sides, like a yin and a yang. To delve into the depths of both, you can transcend the belief system between heaven and hell or the polarity of religion. To be able to not limit yourself to either side. The balance between the two is, in a way, full control.”

Where she is going in the future, Fok/Cyrnai wouldn’t share, wanting to keep it a surprise, but she did give us some hints. The forthcoming remix album will be called Transmix and there will probably be some digital multimedia work coming. Never one to stick with only one medium. Fok has taken her work even further into the digital domain by way of various 2-D and 3D software programs. Expect nothing short of incredible from that avenue of her art.

“SIDELINE” magazine
by Stef Froidcoeur
(Belgium/Europe)

CYRNAI, alias Carolyn Fok is for sure a well-known artist for the strongest industrial adherents. Transfiguration has to be considered as a multi artwork! Next to the cd, it contains a booklet of at least 80(!!!) pages, including 16 written chapters and several paintings, which seem by the way quite best known in Hong Kong. One of the tracks on the cd, entitled “Is this a dream?” is according to me the best description on this masterwork! You really get the impression to be in a strange dream, a little bit surrealistic! The music develops many sided, but I would call it “the ultimate electronic experience”. CYRNAI combines electronic structures with ritual and tribal influences with a strong dark background mood. Her voice seems to have been the subject of many experiments too! Now it sounds very feminine, while on other tracks, I got the impression to hear male vocals. CYRNAI also demonstrates to be able to compose real soundtrack pieces like “Transifiguration” and “Sparks”. I personally am getting more interested in the danceable tribal pieces “Electric Sanctuary”, “Love Sex Desire” and “Is this a dream?”. Notice as well, Carolyn Fok asked several guest musicians to collaborate on her artwork. No doubt about it, Elliott Sharp is for sure the most well-known of these guest musicians. You may remember in our last issue, we talked about the women involved in the underground electronic scene? Well, Carolyn Fok is according to me the best ambassador of this so called female scene! She is full of creativity and really talented!

Blank Expressions, October 1986
“Charred Blossoms” 12″ LP

Cyrnai, former member of TRIAL and A STATE OF MIND, made this record nearly a year ago, but the reverberations of looming darkness and mysteriousness that have remained in my mind since first hearing it have compelled me to write about it today.

On the record she plays all the instruments (everything from drum machine to mandolin), and creates a post-industrial wall of sound that seems to have required a lot more than the mere four tracks on which it was recorded to create. Occasionally, a recognizable sound surfaces from the murky depths of sound: a flute, a piano, distant voices crying out from an endless void.

A 48 page booklet that is included features poetry and prose with abstract images of mind control, rejection and assortment of nightmares. Words and music like this could only come from the darkest recesses of the human psyche.

Objekt, 1986 -Brian Ladd
“Charred Blossoms” 12″ LP

The CYRNAI record is dreamy, with echo vocals floating in and out of percussive locomotion. Conjurs up images of early Cabaret Voltaire – looking through the stained windows of time at a primal existance. Prehistoric and eternally mysterious.

WIRING DEPT, 1986 -Kefer Dewyer
“Charred Blossoms” 12″ LP

An extremely interesting record. Industrial format. Some East Indian music. The wheels of a skateboard crashing into a brick wall inside a tunnel, and blood. An empty kitchen, where the tap drips all night. Screaming in panic, a rat trapped in an oven door. The smell of bread baking.

The noise plus the notes of a wooden flute equals the music of this record. Sounds and words mixed in a grinder to pulp and strained, unclothed and bare. Two hands mixing dried beans in an aluminum can toan unbroken rhythm.

For each drum beat scattered, are a layer of low distorted vocals, as if a knife is cutting raindrops in half. Tape loops. The sound of a doorbell. And the beautiful sirens of a fire engine at 4 in the morning. Unusual graphics. Great Cover. Intense and pulsing.

JERSEY BEAT, 1986 – Bruce Lee Gallanter
“Charred Blossoms” 12″ LP

This is a wonderful, but strange, 12″ EP. There is a certain quality that only music can evoke, which goes beyond the spoken word, to a point where various realities intersect and flow together, like recognizing the beauty of numerous drifting conversations at once. This music has a lovely, calming feeling, and occasionally has the effect of time slowing down. Most of the vocals are mumbled or altered in the distance, alien, but somehow familiar as well. Everything seems to be floating, not totally unlike those free-flowing Gong/Dead dance jams, just much more subtle. The percussion is always at the center, and frequently appears like sampled natural sounds. This provides a mesmerizing quality of soothing tribal rhythms. Flying saucers hover in a jungle of insect-like sounds, while disembodied voices slowly melt in a fluctuating mass.

One must listen closely to the softer sections to take in the full audial environment. By doing this, I heard my immediate surroundings more distinctly, quite Cage-like. The jouney commences with an enchanting acoustic piano intro, followed by delicate, random sounds. A perfect ending. Also incllluded with the bizarre-looking record is a lengthy little booklet of info, which will take you a while to absorb. Just who is this peron anyway & how does one pronounce that name??

FACTSHEET FIVE, 1990 – (T/MG)
“To Subtle-Drive” Cassette

Electro-minimal music from a rather mysterious artist who also uses her own vocals to lend an eerie tone to some tracks. These are rhythmic tracks that ebb and flow with a strange mix of the organic and the machine, exploring some of the synergies between the two. A bit jarring at first, but finds a groove pretty fast.

REFLEX, 1987 – Tapebox
“Parts Of The Insomnic Wheel”

The band (solo artist) has a cassette and booklet on Ladd-Frith. Ambient, distorted and electronic is the rule that not only this band but the label as well. The album – Parts Of The Insomnic Wheel – is very steeped in sorrow, yet less morbid than its label mates. It seems like a sincere effort, especially because it always requires deep thought and continuous listening.

Lil RHINO GAZETTE, 1990M
“To Subtle-Drive” Cassette

Like the dark pomengranites of mythical Hades, these mystical treats leave a certain ghostly taste behind. The best comparison I can give would be something of a cross between Africsn Head Charge, Diamanda Galas and the Empty Quarter. Cyrnai uses her voice as a musical tool for adding a final veneer over the digitally-crafted, tribal-sounding pieces. Recommended.