Carolyn is an Asian American award-winning electronic musician and sound designer whose work spans over five decades. Her early inspiration came from UK electronic artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League. Under the alias CYRNAI, she began issuing solo records in the mid-80s while still in her teens, a period that also saw her playing in the San Francisco-based acts A State Of Mind, Trial, and Rhythm & Noise.
Carolyn is perhaps best known for pioneering a form of experimental music intertwining her sound designs, real life, and popular rhythm constructs.
She is embarking on innovating a new format of releasing music by using a ‘memoir’ to involve drafts and final product, as the product. Therefore, Fok has launched memoirofsound.com. “This is the mother of all projects,” she exudes. “It’s a lifelong project where new material is continually added, then becomes a part of the chronology, indefinitely.”
Although she has been featured in publications including Electronic Musician, Keyboard and Bikini (to mention a few), as well as having collaborated with artists including Elliot Sharp, Jack Hertz, Tim story, Kevin Kendle and Joaquin Lievano, she has been an intensely private musician.
However, she has always spent extensive time in the studio, privately amassing 100+ albums of electronic, experimental music, field recordings, collaborations, bands, and more—and has released these all in one place.
Carolyn’s music and sound began with recording stories on a tape recorder at age 9, 1976. Intrigued with an early drum machine that her father built from scratch, and his multitrack recorder, she developed a self-taught songwriting approach—experimenting in a vacuum growing up in the suburbs of Walnut Creek, CA.
At age 12, Carolyn being playing guitar at church recitals. Around this time, she explored the scattering of musical instruments her father left in the living room, and discovered his Teac 4-track reel-to-reel—which set off a lifelong fascination with sound design.
As one sound engineer, who heard some recently-discovered tapes from that era, noted, “Each one of the tapes that I’ve previewed is a project in and of itself. No one tape was recorded in the same way as the one before it.”
READ CAROLYN’S FULL BIOGRAPHY HERE
CAROLYN’S NEW RELEASE IS “CHRYSALIS”
Imagine the formative creation of the early universe, whether from nothingness or Spirit. Then juxtapose this creative chaos with the equally transformative aspects of how and where human life began or begins, and pair that with the states of constant transformation that everything is always in, and there you have “Chrysalis.”
Beautifully ambient and mesmerizing, yet cinematically awesome at the same time, here in her new 12-track album, Carolyn Fok explores the parallels between the concept of the birth of life in the universe with her own human journey here on Earth. Here we have a degree of vulnerability along with musical precision, as well as rich and interesting electronic textures and sounds, making this an immersive and deeply engaging journey through the cosmos.
Get it here: https://www.carolynfok.com/
