California-based electronic musician and sound designer CYRNAI (aka Carolyn Fok) has issued the first in a series of remixes of her 2025 track ‘Echo Language’ as a single today. Where the original version was a combination of pulsating sequencer rhythms and sound effects underpinned with a relentless heavy beat, the brand new ‘Echo Language Remix One’ sees it remodelled into an industrial techno-funk workout while retaining the hypnotic quality of the original.
The darkly intense ‘Echo Language’ had been just one of several electronic styles utilised on ‘Calamity Of Beauty’ STREAM | BANDCAMP, a long-awaited CYRNAI album issued in April 2025. It was followed four months later by ‘Chrysalis’ STREAM | BANDCAMP, a strikingly different album released as Carolyn Fok that drew on a lifelong fascination with cosmology. It blended analog atmospheric textures with emotional depth on what was a cinematically powerful sonic meditation. Both titles won ‘Best of 2025′ awards from Clouzine Magazine and LIT Music.
Having made music since her early teens, a well received retrospective 6xLP deluxe box set of her work entitled ‘CYRNAI 1980-90’ was issued on the darkwave label Dark Entries in 2018. That year also saw her appear on Cherry Red’s ‘Third Noise Principle’ box set of ‘80s US underground/electronic music in their ‘Close To The Noise Floor presents…’ series, as well as embark on a project to release her full back catalogue via her Memoir Of Sound site HERE. She will be releasing further archival singles from it in 2026.
The 2020s have seen Fok make live appearances as CYRNAI alongside the likes of Morton Subotnick, Suzanne Ciani and Drew McDowall, while she has also spoken on MUTEK festival panels in San Francisco.
Carolyn Fok is an Asian-American artist, writer, electronic and experimental music pioneer whose work spans over five decades since she first dabbled with her father’s TEAC recorder and home-made instruments. Swiftly developing a fascination for sound design, her early inspiration came from UK electronic artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League.
Under the alias CYRNAI, she began issuing solo records in the mid-’80s while still in her teens, a period that also saw her playing in the San Francisco-based acts A State Of Mind, Trial and Rhythm & Noise. Her 1996 album ‘Transfiguration’ included contributions from avant-garde guitarist Elliot Sharp, the 2001 2xCD set ‘The Listener’ (released as Carolyn Fok) featured New Age artist Tim Story, while ‘Magic Realism’ (2011, again as Fok) included a collaboration with Grammy nominated guitarist Joaquin Lievano (Jean Luc Ponty, Zazen).
As Carolyn Fok she recently collaborated with astronomer and scientist Steve Bryson on two 2024 albums, ‘Spacetime Canvas I & II’, and released the album ‘Chrysalis’ in 2025. As CYRNAI, ‘Calamity Of Beauty’ was also issued in 2025.
