TUESDAY 15th February 2011
Door Times : 8pm
£4 on the door
The Wire’s monthly series of salon events returns after an extended Xmas and New Year break with a talk by the man who has been called "the greatest hiphop writer in the world", New York based author and critic Dave Tompkins.
The talk will be based on Dave's acclaimed recent book on the strange science of voice synthesis, How To Wreck A Nice Beach, which traces the history of the vocoder from Churchill's bunker to Stalin’s gulags, from "Autobahn" to Auto-Tune, from T-Mobile to T-Pain (the book's title comes from a mishearing of the vocodered phrase, 'How to recognize speech'). The talk will be illustrated with audio and film clips of vocoders in full effect and will be followed by an audience Q&A session.
Some hype for How To Wreck A Nice Beach:
"Unquestionably brilliant, not only one of the best music books of the year, but also one of the best music books ever written.”
— Los Angeles Times
"A hallucinatory stew of Rimbaud, Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs and Bootsy Collins.”
— New York Magazine
"We should be thankful that Tompkins sacrificed a decade to this unique and beautifully wrought book, in tribute to the brief cultural moment when a tool of militarism, secrets and destruction found itself transformed by music-makers into a zap-gun of heroic space-age liberation." - Mojo
Image: Vocoder terminal, codenamed SAMPLE, Paris, 1944
The Wire Salon is a monthly series of salon events, hosted by The Wire magazine, and dedicated to the fine art and practice of thinking and talking about music. The events consist of readings, talks, panel discussions, film screenings, DJ sets and even the occasional live performance.
How To Wreck A Nice Beach website
The WIRE website
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