Having released the archival collection CYRNAI 1980–90 in 2018, California-based electronic musician and sound designer Carolyn Fok has returned to the CYRNAI alias for a new album, Calamity of Beauty. The record has an experimental feel and spans a range of styles, featuring atmospheric compositions alongside tracks with a more rhythmic, industrial edge. Creative sound design plays just as central a role as composition, giving the album an otherworldly quality unlike anything else.
Fok began making music as CYRNAI in her early teens, drawn to experimental sound by exploring her father’s TEAC reel-to-reel recorder, self-built drum machine, and other instruments. She released several records throughout the 1980s while also playing in San Francisco-based acts Trial and Rhythm & Noise. Her 1996 CYRNAI album Transfiguration included contributions from avant-garde guitarist Elliott Sharp and came packaged with a book featuring 80 pages of surreal writing, paintings, and documented dreams.
In 2018, Fok made her entire archive of music, over 100 albums’ worth, available online through her website Memoir of Sound. Prior to Calamity of Beauty, her most recent releases were under her own name, in a duo with astronomer and scientist Steve Bryson on the albums Spacetime Canvas I & II.
In an email interview, Fok discussed the process and concepts behind her new release as CYRNAI.
I first became aware of your work through the 1996 Transfiguration album, and was reintroduced to it with the CYRNAI 1980–90 collection and the Memoir of Sound website in 2018. What made you return to releasing new music as CYRNAI? What was the overall timeframe for making the album?
Carolyn Fok: Thanks for asking. CYRNAI is inherently idiosyncratic because of how I learned to do music by mixing in life in the first place, so the projects or timeline seem to stage itself in vacuums. Each phase are like lifetimes of personal change. My timeline for music can be conjoined to found-experience and sometimes it aligns with the music industry. Phase created tendencies were shaped in the early years and eras. The 80’s first album, Charred Blossoms, as CYRNAI was created as a teenager developed at my parent’s house in a vacuum. There were only bands, so I learned to orient to loopholes I create. My path started with finding father’s PAIA drum machine he built, Teac 4-track reel-to-reel, and a bunch of used instruments in the living room. Just examples of the start of an investigative approach to music and sound crafting that has a history of a building process. Memoir of Sound archived my years from analog to digital, and doing it was a breathing room cataloging phase. It was set up to be a living archive anyway, paving way for new albums.
As the Memoir of Sound web archive and the vinyl box reissues were in play it brought CYRNAI out as part of 80s-90’s resurgence. Though, my inherent direction at any time naturally rides futuristic trends, including performance techniques, using touch pads, immersive audio, new software etc. And I sometimes collaborate. So making a new album was partly to get out of being exclusively about the past. Calamity of Beauty signaled another transformational vacuum coming into play also, which is evaluating the crash and burn of art forms, AI, and our continuity. And, evaluating personal journeys and how they can exist right now, as things feel intermittent, and increasingly wrapped in the Echo Chambers. A new theme was arising and I deep dive until I surface. I’m glad I have a great deal of patience to really build its own thing, and I’m thankful for those new and legacy who appreciate what I have to do.
You’ve also released an album under your own name, and I saw a mention on social media of another ‘solo’ album in the future. Creatively, how is CYRNAI differentiated for you?
Carolyn Fok: Well, firstly, back to my earliest roots, it came from a time without any tech, but started with diaries and drawings, because it was the only thing that survived any transition. The differentiation between Carolyn and CYRNAI is how things are being processed.. I grew up moving frequently and figuring out memories of places, so I realized I could make it all survive by keeping diaries, literally and musically in the very beginning. Eventually diaries became real-time, written all the time. Subconscious writing and dreams, and music enabled as I gave a name to it, the CYRNAI place. CYRNAI 1996 Transfiguration album was nothing like anything in the music world, ie 80 pages of surreal writing, paintings, documented dreams. It’s too bad streaming platforms doesn’t indicate the booklet. After CYRNAI’s Transfiguration, the next transformation was a spiritual one and I opened up to releasing under Carolyn Fok, ie The Listener, exploring symbols of listening, playing with prose as a thinker. I veered into spiritual experiments. Things were there in the Carolyn mode for a while.
I was going to simply course-correct to Carolyn Fok, as the original approach due to becoming a mother or bringing roots out more. I felt doing ambient creativity was also more feminine and intuitive. My field recordings included the cry of my newborn, or a Cambodian storm, it brought real world sounds from travels etc. It’s deep in its own way. And, going back to paintings were considered high art, since they’ve been in conventions that had original Van Gogh’s, Monet, Rosenquist, etc . So I thought maybe CYRNAI just came from dark teen years and it was too dark to go back. But, I couldn’t quite ignore the CYRNAI I created. CYRNAI is the mega monster of the subconscious, the blatant true sayer. It’s still alive and working overtime regardless what I do. I’m reminded sometimes what I saw as a teen about the world was accurate, the screw ups on humanity that exists more now than ever. CYRNAI is a raw immensity and a vision that became a destination, for the sensitive or empathic. It needs a place, or it’ll be dark in only one place. Although Differentiation can blur sometimes, it’s tricky but they both have potentials and desires for outlet. It’s not too different than artists having multiple project names for certain strains of the same cell. Yes, back to the question, Carolyn Fok has a new ‘solo’ album in the future, and it has inherent hope!
Did you have specific goals or concepts going into the making of Calamity of Beauty?
Carolyn Fok: I know I wanted it to be an album event, thematic and a whole arc. Though, the concept of Calamity of Beauty didn’t start coming together until after my father passed in 2020. Obviously, tons of introspection surrounds. As I was the one who cleared my father’s house, I found endless misc things, like over 70 radios, amps, and hifi’s because he was an audiophile. I did a lot of photos and videos for another potential documentary. Buried under a ton of junk and papers in the living room, was this large statue of a lady lying on her back with a transparent glass on top. As the house had no electricity except one plug, at night I used lamps to get lighting and took those photos. That statue became the cover of Calamity of Beauty. It’s this idea of wreckage where preservation simultaneously unearths relics of beauty, but they forever are saved still among sentiments. Finding the statue was almost like finding my father’s hand built drum machine at age 9 at that moment, asking if he left it for me to find? The album could also wonder whether this was CYRNAI’s memorial, or an unearthing of relics to uncover stories. There’s this beauty and havoc. The contradictions that over time become equal. It’s also about a course collision of our times, where technological effects reorient our attention spans or communications, as if we were floating in and out of our consciousness, the ebb and flow between dream and reality become one, perhaps creative. So the album rides a threshold, that it goes musically from cinematic threshold to pure beat. It’s like each track is a different chapter event. And of course, tons of sound design and effects, in-the-box synthesizer work, molecular editing, going between different softwares, experimenting with rhythmic layers, and I utilized some modular varieties by accessing the Synthesizer Museum’s 200+ physical vintage synths.
Did revisiting your past work for CYRNAI 1980–90 and Memoir of Sound have any impact or influence on the new album?
Carolyn Fok: The impact of past work, although still a monumental treasure and it’ll still take anyone days or weeks to go through, there needed to be something to reflect current times. I wouldn’t say the past had any influence. For a new album, I felt anything new had to be from scratch. However, like the others, involved that deep dive sound design, new technologies, multiple programs. I didn’t want my rhythms to sound like a drum machine or so many things already heard. Even if something was repetitive, there’s something subtle that an artist would have had a hand. Each track won’t be like any other track, which is actually consistent with the archive. It is also made so that any one of them can take off in remixes pretty easily, either EDM or different versions. And that gives me some ideas how to reproach the archive again. I think I work pretty much work in real-time mode.
Could you elaborate on the ‘immersive 360-degree headphone listening’ aspect—was that part of the creative process from the start? And is the fact that not everyone will be listening that way a consideration?
Carolyn Fok: It’s interesting, I just listened to the whole album on my phone speakers after it was released, and I was overcome with cathartic emotions, so it could have been just as effective on a cassette. That was a great test or indication that the work translates. I think to get the most out of an artist’s work would be to experience it as close as how the artist experienced it. That is to get to the epicenter. The epicenter in this case, was music created on headphones and some 360 enhancements. If going on that pilgrimage to be ‘one’ with the artist, is to be in its creation. So I might get the type of headphones that could optimize 360 experiences. Or get the multi-speaker set ups, sort of how home theaters enhance movies. You can still watch movies on a phone, but it would be much better in a theater. Meaning, you’d get the most out of headphones. Particularly, the track ‘Stormvault’ on Calamity of Beauty, showcases 360. I used a funny noise unit called a Ghost box, which is normally used for Paranormal Research. It has radio FM and short wave sounds that flutter and whatever words you randomly hear might contain a message. So I took the output and divided different takes to separate tracks and ran them through a 360 program and automated them with trailing reverbs. It gets cooler the more immersive formats you go. The current release is binaural but I’ll be expanding additional immersive options.
360, or it was 3D audio, was part of the creative process because I had been on that track since the 90’s. The Listener album (Carolyn Fok), utilized 3D audio with software intended for games, which can be heard throughout the album.. I knew an inventor who did proprietary 3D audio who taught me its concepts. The ideas have been around for decades. But today, it’s still met with reservation. I observed traditional engineers still have a hard time wanting the change from stereo even with unlimited ‘objects’ or positions, meaning moving sound points around. Certain music can really benefit from 3D / 360, like space music because orientation doesn’t matter. I happen to do almost all my work in headphones so it’s just the most optimized way to experience my particular work, and have known about spatialization as the way to allow far more sound spaces, and it allows ideas to flourish. 360 will flatten a bit in stereo, but binaural can still give some stretch. There’s room to keep growing and solving discrepancies. I think the audio industry is going through new evolutions. For example, I’m impressed with how frequency is being used to simulate virtual speakers. I was invited to Sony in Los Angeles who measured my ears, and had perfected matching frequencies of a speaker in the room then sound exactly the same in virtual speakers in your headphones. It’s so accurate you cannot tell if you’re listening through speakers or headphones. There are speakers that project 360 audio by mapping your walls, similar to how Metaquest maps walls for augmented reality games. Projection art is similarly being perfected and distances are indistinguishable from real and not real, ie virtual skies and stars indistinguishable to a real sky. Consumers will be able to accurately experience auditoriums to scale in their headphones, similar to how visual VR scale to size. It’s a boutique way of consuming right now, but it’s within reach. There are some irritating gaps though from getting creative uses into the music industry, like I found it sort of funny that some streaming platforms don’t accept sound effects, and you have to convince their bots that it’s art. It’s good to keep wrecking the system to get it to grow. Experimental music is actually critical when the industry doesn’t know what to do with advancing technology.
In our last interview, you mentioned you weren’t doing many live shows at the time and were focused on “filling in pieces of the puzzle.” What is the current status of live performances?
Carolyn Fok: Since our last interview, that was right before a flurry of live performances, but before the pandemic. My performances got tied almost immediately to art/tech speciality festivals, such as MUTEK, performing and also talking on their panel about the future of musical instruments. I was sponsored to tour New York, Detroit, Los Angeles. I did several in Francisco, a festival called Recombinant, performing after Morton Subotick, and performed before Drew McDowell of COIL. I anticipate more multimedia shows, as I seem to be pulled into art tech worlds, though they’re a little more sparse. I’d like to tour. Best thing to do is check my sites for NEWS. By the way, the video single, Echo Language, from Calamity of Beauty is from a live event.
cyrnai.com
memoirofsound.com,
facebook.com/cyrnai
facebook.com/carolyn.fok/.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention or add?
Carolyn Fok: Recently, my ambient albums under Carolyn Fok with a modular collaborator, and Scientist, Steve Bryson, won Best Experimental Album by Clouzine with an additional Honorable Mention award, as well as Nominated for Best Electronic Album by New Age Notes.
