69 minutes, 4 seconds

Negative Format
Cipher Method

When I was in high school, the computer lab used to have a vocoder hooked up to the terminals. Once you ran the program that activated it, you could instruct it to repeat whatever words or phrases you typed on your screen. It was great, if primitive, fun (this was the mid '80s, after all), and naturally the things we instructed the vocoder to say tended toward the juvenile: "This computer is a piece of shit," "Who farted?," and so on. All of which would inevitably get us kicked out of the room by Mr. Moran, the computer teacher at the time.

And yet despite the puerile attempts at humor, I think I was a little awed by the vocoder. It sounded like the voice of the future. Sure, its pronunciation was weird--you had to spell words phonetically to get the thing to sound right--but it was cold and impassive, authoritative and otherworldly. It was a poor man's Darth Vader breathing mask.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that the vocoder has a special place in my heart. Or at least my ears. Negative Format is one of the many bands that make use of it (a more updated-sounding device, of course), and yeah, it sounds retro, but to me it's still futuristic. And not just futuristic, but optimistic. It's the sound of robots, from a time when robots were going to be helpful and the future was bright and full of possibilities and we were all going to zip around on jet packs.

Blade Runner pretty much put the kibosh on all of that. Now the future looks like computer viruses, global warming, and vengeful androids. Oh, well. While we wait for dystopia, we can dance to NF's trancey, bouncy, neato-futuristic CDs.

Also today:

69:03 C-Tec, Let Your Body Die
69:01 Stereomotion, Resistance: 2012
69:00 Sleepwalk, Rapid Eye Movement
69:00 Von Thronstahl, Bellum, Sacrum Bellum!?
69:00 X-Fusion, Demons of Hate (CD 2 of 2)