Carolyn Fok was in Los Angeles, cleaning out her late father’s house, when she discovered the statue of a woman, reclining in a seductive pose amidst the odds and ends stored in a dark room. She shined a flashlight through nearby glass and snapped a photo for what would become the cover of Calamity of Beauty, her latest album as Cyrnai.
Fok, who is also a visual artist and writer, refers to these kind of moments as “found experience.” As a child, she found a drum machine that her father made and began playing around with it. “He didn’t give it to me, I just found it and I found a lot of things,” Fok says on a recent video call. “He would leave secondhand instruments in the living room and I started putting things together as a teen, so finding this statue was like, oh, did he want me to find this too?”
The assorted instruments and gear that she found years ago led to Cyrnai, the artist name that Fok adopted as a teenager making electronic music in early 1980s San Francisco. Recordings like “Analog Delay” (1981) and “Be Happy or Go Straight” (1981), are stunning examples of minimal synth. But Fok, who also played with Bay Area bands like Trial and Rhythm & Noise, evolved with time and new technology. Her 1996 album, Transfiguration, is an avant-garde take on industrial. With Calamity of Beauty, Fok manipulates sound into electronic compositions that bridge artful sound design and club-friendly beats. The album cover, with light shining through an otherwise dark room, illuminating the classical style of the statue, is an apt visual representation of the album for more than just its aesthetics.
“That concept of finding this symbol of beauty, this woman, and, also, in this wreckage,” says Fok. “It seemed like it symbolized that, over time, it became equal, beauty and havoc, this was all in one. I had that in mind.” She also considered the image to be a bit symbolic of our era, with the changing nature of art and “communication breakdowns” in the face of new technologies.
Over the years, Fok has amassed over 100 albums-worth of material, made both as Cyrnai and under her given name. And she remains prolific. A new Carolyn Fok album, Chrysalis, is slated for release in early August.
Much of Fok’s music was unreleased, however, until she launched the archival site Memoir of Sound. “This is two types of history,” she explains. One is the technological history of a period of immense change, where Fok recorded on everything from reel-to-reel to DAT. The other is her personal musical history. “it is kind of a memoir, but it’s an audio diary in a way,” she says.
During what she calls “a Carolyn phase” in her musical career, Fok was also working with swamis and on meditation. “I met this cult-like group, they did electronic music too, and they bought my gear to help them master their work,” she says. “In that process of meeting them, I started mastering my own stuff and that’s what became Memoir of Sound because I had nothing else to do. I was on a roll.”
At the same time, Fok was unexpectedly offered the opportunity to release a box set of her 1980s music through Dark Entries. “Then suddenly, I got swooped up in the ‘80s resurgence and it kind of brought Cyrnai out again,” she says.
Although Calamity of Beauty does also have a song called “Memoir of Sound,” the album is not referencing her previous work. Cyrnai reappeared, but she had changed with the times. “I realized that I always worked on the current technology,” Fok says. “I’m always writing on what’s happening now and also gathering for futuristic stuff.”
An example of that is Fok’s use of 3D audio technology, with which she has been experimenting since the 1990s. “I think experimentation is critical, or experimental music is critical, for a time when the music industry doesn’t know what to do with advancing technology,” she says.
Fok often heads to L.A. from northern California for conferences to learn more about what’s happening in immersive sound. “There are really great advancements in terms of conquering frequency. I’m really impressed with Sony right now,” she says. In fact, she partially relied on Sony’s 360 audio technology for mixing Calamity of Beauty, “even though I know stereo kind of flattens things a little bit,” she adds.
“It’s still kind of on the pro-level,” says Fok of the tech. But, right now, she says, people are generally hearing the music more like a binaural recording, “meaning you have a little bit more depth and a little bit more of that 360 effect, a little bit more than stereo.”
I’ve been listening to Calamity of Beauty on my laptop, but can still notice subtleties that point to the music’s immersive quality. On the title track, which opens the album, there’s a buzzing synth sound that swoops in and out of the composition as if it were a spacecraft. On “Pandemonium Framework” bleeps and bloops seem to move around a steady, industrial stomp of a beat. And, on “Stormvault,” the radio static can envelop the listener.
If you want to get to the “epicenter” of Fok’s work, though, she recommends listening with headphones. “My epicenter is I like composing in headphones, it’s just close to my head,” she says. “My primary way of listening is that, so I think if people are really curious about how an artist heard it, then get as close to how they did it.”
Get Calamity of Beauty by Cyrnai
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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