CYRNAI on Working in Isolation, Building Archives, and Releasing Echo Language Remix One

Transmission 353: Interview with CYRNAI

Carolyn Fok is a California-based electronic musician, sound designer, and writer whose work under the alias CYRNAI spans over five decades. She began recording as a teenager in San Francisco, releasing her first album, Charred Blossoms, while still in her teens, using a home-built drum machine her father had assembled from a kit. During the same period she played in San Francisco-based acts A State Of Mind, Trial, and Rhythm & Noise, and participated in the city’s cross-pollinating underground of punk, post-punk, performance art, and industrial music. Her 1996 album Transfiguration included contributions from avant-garde guitarist Elliot Sharp; the 2001 double-CD The Listener, released as Carolyn Fok, featured New Age artist Tim Story; and Magic Realism (2011) included a collaboration with Grammy-nominated guitarist Joaquin Lievano.

Title: ECHO LANGUAGE Remix One RADIO/CLUB EDIT
Artist: CYRNAI
Release Date: 2026-03-18
Genres: Ambient, EBM, Electronica, Industrial Music
Label: Memoir of Sound
Description: CYRNAI interview: Echo Language Remix One, five decades of experimental electronic music, San Francisco underground, and a 2026 live date.

A retrospective 6xLP box set, CYRNAI 1980-90, was issued on Dark Entries in 2018, the same year she appeared on Cherry Red’s Third Noise Principle compilation of 1980s US underground and electronic music. In 2025 she released two albums: Calamity of Beauty as CYRNAI and Chrysalis as Carolyn Fok. She has made live appearances alongside Morton Subotnick, Suzanne Ciani, and Drew McDowall, and has spoken on panels at MUTEK San Francisco. Echo Language Remix One, the first in a series of remixes of the 2025 track Echo Language, is out now via Memoir Of Sound.

How did you first get into making music? What were your earliest influences, and when did you know this was something you wanted to pursue?

At nine, my father gave me a tape recorder and a microphone. I started by making stories, using sound as scenery. He was a computer systems analyst who built synthesizers and drum machines from kits as a hobby, and one of those early machines ended up on my first album, Charred Blossoms, which I released as a teenager. 

There were records in the house—David Bowie, Elton John—but the radio was what I honed in on around age nine. I put symphonies or rock behind my stories to create a tape theatre. Eventually I discovered a TEAC 4-track among reel-to-reels as a teen. I didn’t know what it was at first. Once I realized it could layer sound, that became an experiment of itself, how many times they could layer in four tracks, without cutting tape. I began recording over tapes, building structures, erasing and rebuilding. 

I was originally on a path toward visual arts, so sound became another medium—like paint or sculpture. I wasn’t trying to belong to a genre or scene. In many ways, I was working in a vacuum. Music was closer to assembling environments. Perhaps moving a lot growing up, made me operate around time periods, fluidity, surrealism and changes, as part of a musical chairs of life.

By college years, I was moving through punk, post-punk, and industrial bands, while also developing my own solo work. There was never a decision of pursuit, but likely that music, art, and writing were companions when I didn’t have anyone to remember the journey in my head.

How did the CYRNAI alias come about?

The name is constructed from my name Carolyn Fok, but reassembled. Pronounced Seer-in-I or See-in-our-eye, Coming from a traditional background, it was a way to quietly exit one framework and enter another. I did realize I needed an art name where I could go as far with creativity, or at the time, a dark night of the soul that was so vast, that it was another human being. As far as I went with thoughts and writing lucid dreams, no one really stopped me so I kept going. Also, as a teen I was around punk scenes where everybody had pseudonyms. It was a little punk rock. But originally, CYRNAI represented subconsciousness and Carolyn Fok, consciousness. And they can crossfade.

Categorically, CYRNAI is the industrial/techno/EBM/EDM, and Carolyn Fok, New Age, Ambient.

What was the San Francisco underground scene like when you were coming up?

It was definitely an organic movement, where the same people in punk bands, cross pollinated into peace punk, then post punk, and performance art, industrial, all coexisting and mutating. Cultures without manuals. They were building their own systems. It isn’t something that can just be duplicated with fashion or formulas, because they involve interconnected communities. I first encountered it in high school—walking into punk shows and seeing a level of energy and visual intensity I hadn’t experienced before. It wasn’t just music. It was identity construction. Blue mohawks, spikes, makeup—it extended beyond the stage. I started bringing that energy back to the suburbs, treating myself as a kind of artwork. Sometimes there were ‘leaders’ or an underground system. They were early social experiments. They expanded into political movements, vegetarianism, communes. Entire alternate ways of living were being lived, and were the seeds or models that are idealized today.

There was also a cassette movement. I was exchanging tapes internationally—UK, France, Amsterdam—building connections through mail, through typed letters that had to be rewritten from the beginning if you made a mistake. That discipline stayed with me. The willingness to reconstruct something completely in order to get it right. 

San Francisco itself was always transitional—eccentric and fertile, innovative. But I’m glad I was a part of those early movements because authentic experiences is what you’ll remember as true memories. 

What were the biggest hurdles at the beginning?

Maybe visibility although it wasn’t the reason for doing art/music. There were no clear pathways for electronic music let alone experimental work, especially if it didn’t fit into a defined category. You had to create your own context. Electronic music wasn’t really recognized in the U.S. It existed more prominently in Europe. Even within bands, I was often the only one working with experimental structures on a four-track and working with electronic instruments was just like doing your own painting. But those same recordings I did as a teen are still circulating now as artifacts. I’ve lived through multiple cycles—analog to digital, underground to archive. Eventually, I built my own structure—a living online archive, with over a hundred releases. It’s a result of complete patience, endurance, or in times of hurdles, I think I endure by creating a musical work that shows me a beacon or a lighthouse when I’m at sea at night, or I’m the lighthouse that’s always on.

Is there a central idea in Echo Language?

The idea begins with signals that are emotional, sonic, almost cellular, attempting to form into something recognizable. Echo Language exists somewhere between memory and transmission. Like traces of the Chinese language, not as something fluently spoken. It reflects how we communicate in fragments. Messages travel, distort, arrive altered. By the time they reach us, they’ve been shaped by time, distance, and whatever invisible architecture they passed through. So what we receive is not the original message—it’s the echo. We’re all participating in a kind of incomplete system. We speak in partial signals. We receive in fragments. It’s as if everyone is holding different pages of the same conversation. There’s also a sense of temporal slippage—messages arriving too late, or too early, or partially erased. We respond to versions of each other that have already shifted and it’s about what survives distortion.

What does the phrase “echo language” mean to you?

You say one thing, but what returns to you has been rearranged by space and time. “I don’t recall what we were talking about, but I’m pretty sure it was important.”

How did you approach remixing your own track?

When I create a piece, I rarely make a single version. There are usually twenty plus variations—different structures, different energies, alternate paths the piece could take. The final version is something carved out of those possibilities. So the “remix” isn’t something that happens after the track. It often exists from the beginning as one of those alternate forms. The version that becomes the remix is then refined—production. I naturally venture off so it was better to display variations this way. And sometimes a song is carved out of numerous venturing.

How do you decide whether a project goes out as CYRNAI or as Carolyn Fok?

Generally, I will already have two folders for CYRNAI and Carolyn Fok each, and I’ll already know from the start when creating what the project will be. In terms of its capacity, that includes everything from industrial, dance, disco, experiments, and some textural ambient so it’ll be clear from the start. The Carolyn Fok productions are more sparse and selective, especially with music type, such as New Age or conceptual ambient.  CYRNAI seems to have endured and it is a place I’m able to be completely free with it, and it can take on all of the types, because after four/five decades you pull from all the phases. Both exist in parallel, and eventually, they converge. 

What was behind Calamity of Beauty as a title and as a project?

The project was meant to contain various rooms or vessels. Each piece or rooms, were like fusions of overlapping ideas, thoughts, our subconscious layers, this patchwork of yourself and others and experiences from the world. And yet, not one person has ever seen those internal landscapes in our actual minds. The wholeness of human life perceived fragments and relics we leave another, symbols of beauty we try to hold as they are produced with hope and sympathy. The music and art made are sculptural memoirs of a creative life that an archive has had. The beauty are the relics of our archives, that become important like the peaks of our time but yet all will become overridden by time and we only have relics, the statues, the symbols, the art.

How did your interest in cosmology develop, and how does it feed into your music?

It’s my version of cosmology from a journeyman perspective. Cosmology gave me a way to think beyond human scales. Early on, I was writing stories—imagining systems, forces shaping outcomes. Later, that expanded into meditation, observation, metaphysics, and a kind of tracking of patterns—what I think of as synchronicities or precise alignments. I call certain alignments ‘miraculous timings.’ 

In music, there’s ways where elements land. Almost like a form of automatic composition. There’s what I call “blind composing”—building layers without hearing the full context, then bringing them together afterward. It introduces relationships that wouldn’t exist if everything were standard listening. Meaning, you don’t play along with it, you discover it by being blind, but end up with miraculous timings.

How do you relate to the lineage of experimental electronic music—figures like Morton Subotnick or Suzanne Ciani?

There’s a shared foundation in exploration and early electronics. We probably relate to a sense of possibility with it. Artists like Morto Subotnick and Suzanne Ciani represent a parallel emergence—different contexts, similar impulses.

But my trajectory was separate. We come from different generations, movements, and pioneering style. I was working in isolation—building systems with whatever was available, without reference points. There is also a difference in approach. Early modular systems operated in real-time. My work tends to be very incremental compositions, almost like pen and ink pointillism. They function as an archive—a layered record, almost like a diary of sound.  And the way I’ve constructed and developed was through numerous brands of synths, samples, building gigantic diaries of musical phases, versus any particular maker. I know there is a school of modular in that lineage that really dislike samples. Whereas, I created software (called Robotic Editor) for editing samples because I used only samples at one time. I think we relate most to pioneering our own methods and created our own signatures. And we happen to be called experimental electronic music because we can all agree to human exploration.

What non-musical influences have shaped your work?

Natural phenomena, visuals and painting, written diaries. I tend to document experiences, as the theatre of our souls. One of my favorite things to do, is travel and wander, where things work out perfectly. For example, I just came from encountering the Northern Lights near the North Pole, at 30 degrees below zero. I saw them on the plane, but only 15 minutes after I got out the skies just exploded with electricity. And I became at awe with the perfect timing of a random occurrence like that, something your subconscious led you and trusted instincts worked. That type impulse goes into my music all the time, and how fluidity itself influences the flow of musical output. 

Has your relationship to technology changed over five decades of making music?

I think I’ve had the same relationship to technology from the 1970’s homemade drum machine as the newest plug-ins, in that they’ve always been that strange loyal companion, the thing that survived everything, the eras, phases, transitions, social movements, etc. In that sense its developments have just been reliably captivating to me, and I loved being a part of its evolutions, from analog to digital and imaginings of future technology. Although simultaneously, growing and developing as a human being over time deepens the wisdom and experience with technology as much.

What role does politics or the wider world play in what you make?

My earlier teen years were the only time I was involved in political movements, the peace punk phase. We did releases addressing human and animal rights. There were communes, with activists, international coalitions, protests. This was actually the time period my first album, Charred Blossoms, was released as a teen. It was heavily influenced by political issues, but I took on more psychological angles. I was involved with others who were vegetarians and anarchists who sung about issues of war, world conflict, and basically the world you were facing, a type of world where your inner self suppressed or got lost. In some fear of that, I ensured to myself since a teen, to create paper trails in the event I got lost, which are my archives. And I think music is a kind of truth serum, that brings you back to who you are.

What are you working on now?I’m continuing to expand both the CYRNAI and Carolyn Fok worlds—new albums, remixes, a book of diaries, documentary work, live. For updates, go to memoirofsound.com, cyrnai.com. I welcome connecting on Facebook to answer any questions. https://www.facebook.com/carolyn.fok  and https://www.facebook.com/cyrnai/

There’s also a live performance scheduled for August 2026 in San Francisco, sponsored by R. U. Sirius, the legendary cyber culture celebrity, who was instrumental in shaping early cyberculture as co-founder, co-editor Mondo 2000 magazine. 

Photos courtesy of CYRNAI

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others