Robot Rock du Jour: Neil Young – Trans LP (1982)
In 1982, Neil Young was abducted by robot aliens who grafted an organic neural-net processor onto his existing human brain and sent him back to Earth to make vocoder-infused, heavily distorted guitar rock. Five of the nine tracks on Trans were recorded by this Neil Young Beta Unit, who also remixed Mr. Soul as the b-side on the Sample and Hold 12″ single.
SCHEMATIC: Other Neil Young Beta Unit videos and cover art…
So, the actual story here, according to Wikipedia, is that Neil Young’s son was born with cerebral palsy. Somewhere along the line, Mr. Young found that he was able to elicit a better response from his son when using the Moog vocoder. Pretty awesome. Not sure if this album is a result of Mr. Young pushing the creative envelope or just ruminations on technology and communication. Either way, this album was a really, really pleasant surprise.
Sample and Hold (LP Version)
We R In Control
Computer Age
Transformer Man
Computer Cowboy
Mr. Soul (Dance Remix)
Trans LP Cover Art
I found-out in Mr. Dave Tompkins’ book ‘How to Wreck a Nice Beach’ that Mr. Neil Young actually used a Sennheiser Vocoder VSM201 and NOT a Moog 16-Channel MBVO 327A Vocoder that I and others had erroneously believed!!
This error came from the fact that the Moog Vocoder has a switch called “Sample/Hold” and the ablum ‘Trans’ has a track titled “Sample and Hold”.
VoiceEncoder
17 Jul 11 at 00:05