California-based electronic musician and sound designer CYRNAI (aka Carolyn Fok) has released two tracks from her forthcoming ‘Calamity of Beauty’ album as a new single today. Demonstrating the diversity of the full record, its title track is a highly atmospheric slice of neo-kosmische musik, while ‘Pandemonium Framework’ is a hypnotic slab of club-friendly industrial techno somewhat akin to a sleeker take on her already available ‘Echo Language’ single STREAM | VIDEO issued in February.
Fok has made music as CYRNAI since her early teens and made several records in the 1980s that were collected in the deluxe vinyl retrospective box set ‘CYRNAI 1980-90’ issued in 2018 by the San Francisco-based darkwave label Dark Entries. She also appeared on Cherry Red’s ‘Third Noise Principle’ retrospective box set of ’70s-’80s US underground/electronic music released in 2019 as part of their ‘Close To The Noise Floor presents…’ series. This was followed by live shows alongside the likes of Morton Subotnick, Suzanne Ciani and Drew McDowall, while she has also spoken on MUTEK festival panels and played more recent dates in and around San Francisco. ‘Calamity of Beauty’ is the latest stage in her renaissance as CYRNAI.
CYRNAI | brief biography
CYRNAI is the alias of Asian-American artist, writer and electronic musician Carolyn Fok, an experimental pioneer whose work spans over four decades since first dabbling with her father’s TEAC recorder and home-made instruments in 1981. Specialising in experimental sounds and swiftly developing a fascination with sound design, she gained inspiration in her early teens from industrial electronic artists like Cabaret Voltaire. Starting to record as CYRNAI while still in her mid-teens, she issued several records in the 1980s while also playing in the San Francisco-based acts Trial and Rhythm & Noise.
Her 1996 album ‘Transfiguration’ included contributions from avant-garde guitarist Elliot Sharp, while the 2001 2xCD set ‘The Listener’ (released in 2001 as Carolyn Fok) featured composer Tim Story and ‘Magic Realism’ (2011, again as Fok) included a collaboration with Grammy nominated guitarist Joaquin Lievano (Jean Luc Ponty, Zazen). Her most recent releases have been as Carolyn Fok in a duo with astronomer and scientist Steve Bryson on the albums ‘Spacetime Canvas I & II’.
In addition to the Dark Entries release of ‘CYRNAI 1980-90’, 2018 also saw Fok embark on a project to release her vast archive of music via her website Memoir of Sound, which contains over 100 albums worth of her electronic and experimental music, field recordings, collaborations and band projects.
new single
out 19th March 2025
(Memoir of Sound)
