Across 135th Street – Dave Tompkins, Vocoders and Misunderstandings

Dave Tompkins’ fascination with voice manipulation began as a child, around the time he first spoke into the blades of a whirring fan. That fascination undoubtedly spiked the moment he was introduced to the Jonzun Crew’s “Pack Jam,” and its greatest realization is his authorship of *How To a Wreck a Nice Beach* (2010), his acclaimed and essential history of the Vocoder. Birthed as a wartime tool of espionage and employed to mask classified messages, the Vocoder has since become synonymous with various strains of forward-facing music’s everlasting computer love. On the latest episode of Across 135th Street, host Chairman Jefferson Mao invites Tompkins to dig deep into his bountiful cache of voice-processed sounds of science and other weird shit: Vocoders and misunderstandings, drones, ballads, bass and frequency discriminators… or something to that effect.