Born in 1931 in an Alberta, Canada mining town and deceased in 1988 from heart failure, Bruce Haack is rightfully considered one of the trailblazers of electronic music. He’s responsible for an eclectic and often eccentric oeuvre, but his most famous LP is the one he made for Columbia in 1970. The Electric Lucifer remains an inimitable and visionary work.
Quickly dropping out of Julliard in the mid-‘50s, Bruce Haack initially made a living writing both pop songs and scores for dance and theater, but on his way to electronic music immortality he also simultaneously devoted his energies to serious composition, completing work in the highly prescient musique concrète style, a form wildly popular with the ‘50s avant-garde. He was also a creator of early synthesizers, with his inventions landing him on television programs such as The Tonight Show and I’ve Got a Secret, where Haack often demonstrated his heat and touch sensitive Dermatron. As such, he’s often linked with Raymond Scott as an inhabitant of the oddball-visionary wing of electronic music, the ties to Scott enhanced by a significant portion of his discography being designed for the enjoyment and benefit of youthful ears.
In the case of the three volumes of Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, the intended audience was still lolling in the crib, but the records produced by Haack for his own Dimension 5 label took on a more educational approach. Offered in homemade black and white covers with the assistance of dance instructor Esther Nelson, pianist Ted “Praxiteles” Pandel, and later Haack’s friend and business manager Chris Kachulis, their look and sound does give off a strong whiff of the unconventional.
However, spending time with Emperor Norton’s 1999 CD/LP survey Listen Compute Rock Home – The Best of Dimension 5 reveals an aesthetic that’s ultimately not much stranger than the early personality of Jim Henson, sharing with the Muppet man a desire to engage the growing mind through imagination rather than exuding superciliousness or thinly veiled attempts at conformity. And the creativity and frequent sense of humor allow the music to transcend its didactic aims and to be of continued interest to inquisitive adults.
Henson obviously caught on while Haack and crew didn’t, but their work was well-received enough that Dimension 5 existed for over a decade, releasing eight LPs between ’62 and ’76, with the electronic pioneer even landing a ’68 synth demonstration spot on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And unlike those Scott albums, which are very interesting but somewhat mystifying in relation to their stated purpose, Haack’s objectives are in no way debatable.
Regarding the children’s material, that Emperor Norton comp is a heap of fun and a very enlightening trip into Haack’s rep as both an innovator and an enigmatic musical mind, but it should also satisfy the curiosity of all but the most obsessive early electronic devotees. No doubt Haack nuts will want more, and last year’s reissue by the Mississippi label of two Dimension 5 titles, ‘68’s The Way-Out Record for Children and ‘69’s The Electronic Record for Children, are tailor-made for the guy’s fan base.
And as stated, they could easily interest lovers of unusual music who also happen to be looking for a shared listening experience with their fledgling offspring, since those two discs are also the nearest Haack came to the realms of the psychedelic prior to The Electric Lucifer’s release. It was during this period that Kachulis provided his friend with exposure to the era’s acid-rock brigade, and the consequences set Haack’s mind ablaze. The results comprised his only major label release.
Since he’d reportedly taken peyote as a youth in Alberta, Haack’s affinity for psychedelia should really be no surprise. The initial shocker comes through just how different The Electric Lucifer is from the period’s psych-rock standard. Indeed, in formal terms the LP isn’t rock at all, but rather a big dose of heady, oft melodic and heavily conceptual electronic music.
The record comes in the form of a story, specifically an anti-war tale relating a struggle between heaven and hell. As expected, Lucifer is his typical bad self. But even the nefarious one from down below is unable to withstand Haack’s concept of Powerlove, a spiritual force so intense it transcends and heals humanity’s differences and culminates in a utopian renewal. Hey Lucifer baby, all is forgiven; welcome home.
If The Electric Lucifer initially impresses due to its avoidance of trite bandwagon jumping, one of Haack’s biggest achievements comes through his survival of the frankly very great potential for hippydippiness in the thematic aims department. This is not to suggest that it’s not very much a product of its time; even though it carries distinctiveness from open to close, it really could’ve only come from one bygone era.
So it’s also a time capsule of sorts. But an especially forward-thinking one, since the opener “Electric to Me Turn” finds Haack singing through an early vocoder of his own invention. He named the device Farad after the 19th century English scientist and inventor Michael Faraday, and while quite familiar today its sound is unlike anything else that emerged on wax circa 1970.
But the success of “Electric to Me Turn” ultimately relates to the combination of Farad’s ambiance with the Moog and modulator-driven expression of Haack’s skills as a songwriter. The Electric Lucifer is pretty far from any kind of pop album, but the artist’s melodic sensibilities do greatly shape the proceedings into an affair closer to NYC’s Silver Apples than Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon.
It’s still solidly Haack’s own thing though, and the percolating vibrations of “Electric to Me Turn” set the stage quite well. From there comes “The Word,” a brief segment of Biblical exposition accompanied by washes and squiggles of synth, and it quickly segues into “Cherubic Hymn.” As the intriguing and very rhythmic electronic atmosphere persists, it also adds another element. And a huge factor in The Electric Lucifer’s success will come directly down to how individual listeners connect with Haack’s singing style.
To say that he eagerly utilizes a zealous ‘60s crooning method is perhaps understating the case a bit. It’s surely a mode of delivery that has no real contemporary counterpart. This does limit the disc’s effectiveness somewhat, but it also greatly enhances that time capsule vibe. Haack was by no means completely detached from the tides of the age, and if his expressiveness can be a bit much at moments (particularly one instance on side two), it also helps to define The Electric Lucifer (for me at least) as a product of its era while it remains consistently prophetic of future musical events.
This dual nature gives “Program Me” a weird kick. The music largely exists in electro territory that should provide early Cabaret Voltaire fans with a real charge, yet it also finds Haack’s vocalizing attaining an intensity that’s downright theatrical. While strange, as these two threads unfurl they also don’t really register as out-of-synch with each other.
Even by this early point it’s clear that Haack possessed versatility along with his talents as an innovator, and if sometimes pegged as an oddball, his music shares basically nothing with the aura of “wrongness” that often comes attached to “outsider” music. In this regard, it’s worth noting that The Electric Lucifer was one of Rolling Stone’s top picks for 1970.
The distinction didn’t help it to sell many copies. That’s just as well though, since a wide audience would’ve likely been befuddled by the abstract qualities of “War.” Beginning as an ominous soundscape combined with a martial synth beat, it quickly spasms-out and then progresses through a midsection that’s reminiscent of diced-up and then randomly reedited field recordings of Wendy Carlos. After this a child’s voice intones “I don’t want to play anymore,” and then the piece moves toward its conclusion with a troubling drift of electronics.
If peace was Haack’s objective, “War” is pretty far from a recipe for mellow times, and these dark aspects assist the whole in serving up a vibrant contemporary listen. “National Anthem to the Moon” continues the story via mechanical early drumbox rhythms and vocals echoed by Farad, and side one closes with “Chant of the Unborn,” a brief cut that could be mistaken as a demo fragment by The Normal.
The flip begins with “Incantation” as Haack spices up the surroundings with Jew’s harp and synthetic handclaps. Unfortunately, “Angel Child” is the one place on the album where Haack’s singing, which here is suggestive of a brutally emotive summer stock understudy getting his big break in a third-rate musical, overwhelms and nearly sinks things. Some really interesting sonic looping is going on behind him, but it’s a major task to hear it as Haack plays to the rafters.
Thankfully, “Angel Child” is only a minute long, and is followed by the excellent “Word Game.” Here Kachulis’ vocalizes robotically as the music becomes extremely layered; at one point a synth frazzles like a live wire on mid-afternoon July pavement. And it gets better from there, for “Song of the Death Machine” is like a nursery rhyme delivered by a malfunctioning cyborg lumbering down a futuristic arcade midway.
Of all The Electric Lucifer’s cuts, the lengthy “Supernova” just might make the best individual case for Haack’s lasting relevance, mainly because it isn’t remindful of anything else. As it plays, Haack whispers to strong effect, and while he does return to his standard mode of voice for “Requiem,” it detracts very little from the song’s multi-faceted closing gesture.
For many, this rates as Bruce Haack’s greatest effort, and though I haven’t heard all of his output (with the exception of “Funky Little Song,” The Electric Lucifer’s Dimension 5 follow-up Together, released under the name Jackpine Savage, has thus far eluded me) I’ll agree with that assessment. I don’t rank it quite as highly as some of its more devoted fans, but I do consider it to be an important and very listenable document with a few truly outstanding moments.
Haack kept making useful music well into the 1980s. For evidence, please see “Party Machine,” his ’82 collab with a young Russell Simmons, later of Def Jam fame. But The Electric Lucifer is the disc that serves him best. While easily reinforcing his reputation as an innovator, it’s a testament to his artistry and unique voice that after forty-three years there’s still nothing else like it.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
