Songs Without Throats, 1970s-80s works (Black Truffle, 2019)
Vinyl LP
12-inch LP
Black Truffle BT041, 2xLP
Collection of Bre Pettis
MUS.2026.032
Description
Paul DeMarinis's synthetic-speech songcraft, 1970s-80s: Speak & Spell chips, homebuilt instruments like The Pygmy Gamelan, and early speech synthesis coaxed into music — media archaeology before the term existed. Black Truffle remastered double-LP compilation.
The instrument on the cover is one of DeMarinis's homemade touch guitars: a guitar-shaped wooden plank whose fingerboard is a strip of etched copper touch-plates on circuit board, ribbon-cabled to an exposed handmade circuit. It has no strings — fingers bridging the copper pads bring the player's own skin resistance into the oscillator circuit, the same body-in-the-circuit idiom as Michel Waisvisz's Cracklebox. It is the instrument heard on 'Yellow Yankee' (1983), included on this record — the cover photograph is the instrument you're hearing.
Further reading: Geeta Dayal's review of Songs Without Throats for 4Columns — https://4columns.org/dayal-geeta/paul-demarinis