ALBUM OF THE MONTH - THE ELECTRIC LUCIFER - BRUCE HAACK (1970)

Bruce Haack was born in 1931 in the isolated town of Rocky Mountain House in Alberta, Canada. The only child of an abusive mother and a father who had died young, Haack taught himself to play piano by age four, and was teaching others in the neighbourhood by age 12. As a child, he would sometimes join local First Nations pow-wows and take peyote.

Despite the fact that he had perfect pitch and could play back any tune after hearing it once, Haack was rejected from the University of Alberta’s music program since he could not sight read music. Instead, he studied psychology while playing piano and gigging in his free time. One of the bands he played with occasionally performed Ukrainian folk music - Eastern music would go on to greatly influence Haack’s work. He also developed an interest in electronic music, since he could use a tape recorder and play all the instruments himself without having to write any notation.

Haack briefly attended New York’s Juilliard School on a scholarship but dropped out, finding it too restrictive. He supported himself by composing for theater and writing musique concrete compositions. Without any technical electronic background, Haack began to gut radios and build inventions through trial and error. Some of his creations included Mr. C, an analog synthesizer robot that played live music, the motion-coded Farad vocoder (named after Michael Faraday), and a suitcase-sized sampler/synth that used touch sensors to trigger lights and sounds. These creations earned him appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and CBS's I’ve Got a Secret.

Haack also began to record strange, psychedelic children’s songs with his with friends Esther Nelson (a children's dance instructor Haack played piano for) and Ted Pendel (a fellow pianist from Juilliard). They worked out of a makeshift studio in a Manhattan apartment, releasing albums under the label Dimension 5.

Haack’s friend Chris Kachulis became his unnoficial business manager, accompanying the reluctant composer to meetings with advertising agencies. Haack’s ability to write 15-second jingles on the spot led to scoring commercials for big clients Goodyear and Kraft.

Kachulis also introduced Haack to psychedelic rock, and in 1969, Haack released his first album for adults, the acid-drenched The Electric Lucifer. It was recorded in Haack’s own studio, however Kachulis helped bring the album to the attention of Columbia Records, who went on to release it as Haack's major-label debut.

The Electric Lucifer was a psychedelic, anti-Vietnam war album, driven by a Moog synth, acid rock guitars, quirky electronic vocoder vocals (some of them provided by Kachulis), and Haack’s home made synthesizers. The album is about the power of love to unite humanity, with Miltonian lyrics referencing the fall of Satan in the Book of Revelation (in The Word). At times, the music takes on a menacing, even sinister tone, especially in the instrumentals War (which unexpectedly breaks into a baroque synth melody) and Chant of the Unborn.

Haack’s background in children’s music comes through with its innocent take on conflict and love. Program Me draws a parallel between computers and a child’s early learning experiences, while Word Game offers a playful but slightly satanic twist on a spelling song.

While it was well-received by critics, the album was Haack’s only major label release, with all of his following albums coming out on Dimension 5. In declining health, Haack drew inward, falling into drugs and alcohol. In 1978 he released Haackula, a cynical psychosexual album with so much cursing (the obscenity even caught me off guard) that it wasn’t released until 2016. One of the tracks, Blowjob, was rewritten as a children’s track, Snow Job, with minimal changes. His final album, 1981’s Bite explored similar subject matter.

In 1982, Haack and Russell Simmons recorded Party Machine, Haack’s final song before he passed away from heart failure in 1988. In the 90s, his music was rediscovered, and Haack is now considered to be an icon in electronic music, with a tribute album by artists such as Beck and Stereolab, and sample features with Kanye West and J Dilla.

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