Cybotron

A Glorious Crown



".I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown?
And, whiles I live, to account this world but hell,
Until my mis-shaped trunk that bears this head
Be round impaled with a glorious crown?
And yet I know not how to get the crown?
For many lives stand between me and home:
And I,--like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way and straying from the way;
Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out,--
Torment myself to catch the English crown?
And from that torment I will free myself,
Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down"
R3



The Concord Music Group: Who knows? Playboy, Hefner, a bunch of strangeness. But the entire Fantasy records Vault including Cybotron were owned by Saul Z and he sold it to Concord. And this is what Concord decided to front Cybo with. I was not consulted.



" .Getting any credit for being an innovator brings about almost instant emulation," says Rik Davis, the singular Detroit-bred artist behind Cybotron, "so an artist is forced to use devices or metaphors to make it as difficult as possible for a bunch of posers to rip off his particular style. You have to keep coming up with new stuff so that it becomes harder and hard to nail down what it is you're doing. Otherwise the world would be full of Picassos and Hendrixes. Many have tried and many have failed."
On his new Fantasy release, Cyber Ghetto, the much anticipated follow-up to 1992's Empathy, Davis succeeds in confounding any expectations that may have been generated by previous Cybotron recordings. Once techno music developed into a virtually ubiquitous soundtrack for both underground raves and trendy dance clubs, Davis felt compelled to move beyond his own pathbreaking experiments, which first came to the fore in a series of home studio-produced Cybotron electronic recordings in the early 1980s (Enter, released on CD in 1990 as Clear).
"It's like the old nomadic, Semitic tribesmen in the desert, he explains. "If you'd dig a hole and water came into it, you'd dig a well, and people from miles around would start fighting over it and then you'd just move on some place else in the desert and hope that you could dig another well."
Davis's latest well was dug as a solo effort. The Cybotron saga began over a decade ago when he and fellow electronic musician Juan Atkins, joined by guitarist Jon-5, began recording such influential tracks as "Clear," "Cosmic Cars," and "Techno City." Bringing together sounds and styles ranging from the synthesized dreamscapes of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream to the unpredictable cosmic funk of George Clinton, Cybotron moved the music into a new realm that transcended the past and anticipated the future.
In the long interim between Enter and Empathy, the original three musicians went their separate ways. (Davis formerly called himself 3070 but notes that "my training in Zohar discipline culminated before I did [Empathy] so right now I'm psychologically- and spiritually-speaking Rik.") Davis has assumed the Cybotron mantle and mission.
A Vietnam veteran who is extremely sensitive to the quality of social and metaphysical life on the planet, Davis studied electronics after returning to Detroit from the service and worked as a communications technician. But he links his original inspiration for becoming a cyber artist to a scene in Forbidden Planet when a character takes out a little cymbal and plays electronic music that had originated ten thousand centuries ago. "From that point on I've been into electronic music."
How Davis makes his music and what people call it are issues of deliberate ambiguity. "I sort of keep the specific instrumentation secret," he explains, "because, for some reason, people have a tendency to believe that it's the instrument that's playing the music, not the artist. So I'll say that my instrument is made up of three keyboards with MIDI interfacing, and let it go at that. It's recorded mostly live in the studio and written to be played live—it's portable."
As to "techno," a label that is inevitably applied to his music, and "cyber," a term he uses more comfortably, Davis explains that "the difference is on a metaphysical plane. It's like Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The difference between the workers' underground city and the cyberdrome, the control center of the metroplex in the sky city. Ideas infiltrate from the techno city to the cyberdrome. It's like Hungarian folk musicians, gypsy violinists, trying to infiltrate a modern orchestra. Just as the Hungarian classical musicians raided the gypsy camps for their dances and musical themes, and denied the musicians themselves places in the orchestra, you always have people raiding r&b, the blues, and it becomes a bandwagon and they jump on to take over. The idea is to evolve in such a way as to make that as difficult for them to do as possible."
Rather than creating "product" for dance clubs, Davis designs his music for listening. "When you listen," he says, "you're actually training your ears, and not enough people really take the time to listen to something like a Sgt. Pepper or an Electric Ladyland, where there is such attention given to the three-dimensional soundstage, reverb, phrasing, and things like that."
Much has been made in the past about the urban origins of house and techno music, particularly the industrial decay of a city like Detroit. Davis points out another kind of environmental determinism: "There are certain land areas on the planet that have different types and amounts of energy, they become psychically and spiritually active, and produce an effect that can be seen or felt in the art forms. The energy affects different people in different ways. We're like tuning forks and resonate at different points."
Davis would like to take the music of Cybotron out of the studio and onto the road, if he is presented with "the right multimedia environment" and "if the circumstances and the vibration on the planet surface are conducive to the proper state of being."
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A sampling of reviews of Empathy:
"Rough edges and prickly emotions make Empathy a dangerous listening experience. Cybotron. . . lets passion overwhelm any inclination he might have to conform to the strictures of commercial electronic music. By not tying his music into tidy packages—and no packages come tidier these days than techno—he uses contemporary sample/synth textures to evoke a more chaotic and experimental time. Spectres of Hendrix, in particular, haunt his stuttering drum patterns, jam-session looseness, minor keys, and half-yelling vocal style. . . But the less derivative parts of Empathy are even more effective. On the album's most ambitious cuts. . . he envelops vocal samples in ominous colors to create a bouquet in barbed wire."
—Bob Doerschuk, Keyboard (4/94)
"These are concerned dispatches about the state of society and the cosmos from an African American Vietnam vet who worked as a communications technician and became a voyager in tones and circuits. He analyzes as many planetary vibes as Sun Ra, baffles his imitators, and yearns to see what's over the next sine wave."
—Milo Miles, Village Voice (2/15/94)
"**** [Rik] Davis humanizes techno and makes computerized music sound organic. Highly recommended."
—Jill Hamilton, Ann Arbor News (1/29/94)"