What felt new, however, was that a hip-hop artist like Kanye West sounded like the indie-folk Bon Iver, and vice versa. A vocoder was used in the film A Clockwork Orange to give an ominous twinge to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony,” as well as by artists ranging from Cher to Coldplay. “Runaway,” for example, concludes with a stunning four-minute solo vocoder riff where West’s voice becomes its own instrument in an orchestra of robots.īut the use of Auto-Tune and vocoders, which are engineering techniques that take the input of a human voice and synthesize them to sound digitally manipulated, is nothing new. West crowned Vernon one of his “favorite living artists” and then invited him to sample it for West’s song “Lost In the World,” off of 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - an album that marked a sophisticated leap in West’s use of synthesizers. The result feels like a Kanye West moment is because it is one - only Bon Iver did it first.īack in 2009, West heard Bon Iver’s “Woods,” a quiet single on his EP Blood Bank, and immediately fell in love with its tender use of Auto-Tune, which until then was primarily proliferated by hip-hop artists like T-Pain. But others might call it a sonic miracle or sorts, for its ability to do in the moment what no synthesizer has done before. That night, Messina himself was somewhere behind the scenes conducting “nerdery,” as he calls it. These effects on “715 – CRΣΣKS” are all made possible through a groundbreaking new synthesizer known as The Messina, which is a combination of hardware and software put together by Vernon’s engineer, Chris Messina. Or if an encrypted caller asked you to meet “down along the creek,” in a way that makes you think: “Okay, maybe I will.” Scratchy, deep breaths throughout give it a slow, dramatic tempo Vernon’s voice is multiplied into a choir of moody men, all harmonized in real-time by Vernon himself. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of listening to “715 – CRΣΣKS,” it sounds like if Darth Vader spent a lonely winter’s night rambling about love, loss, and Wisconsin. A singular spotlight illuminated him from behind - an ultralight beam, if you will - and the crowd hushed as he revved his keyboard engines to play the heavily-synthesized, vocals-only song “715 – CRΣΣKS,” from his album 22, A Million, which came out in September. About a third of the way through Bon Iver’s show in December at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the singer Justin Vernon had his Kanye West moment.
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