The musician had drawn influence from composer John Cage and created the group The Cambridge Electric Opera Company to explore electronic and traditionally-based music; although the group perform on the album, it was credited to Stoughton alone to avoid confusion with fellow Elektra band Earth Opera.
[2] Stoughton envisioned the group as an outlet for both his electronic and more traditional-based works,[3] and recruited his former Harvard peer Mal MecKenzie on bass, jazz drummer Joe Livolsi, singer Devi Klate, the classically trained countertenor John Nicholls and a trumpet player and flugelhorn player taken from the Harvard orchestra.
Following Newsweek's mention of the group in an article on cutting-edge pop music, Stoughton visited New York City to find a record deal; he was offered deals from Columbia, Warner/Reprise, Capitol and several smaller companies, though the interest of Elektra Records came when the label's publicity head Danny Fields enjoyed hearing Stoughton's electronic music at Warhol's The Factory.
"[2]Recorded in Boston,[2] and written and produced by Stoughton,[4] Transformer exemplifies the influence of Cage's musique concrète on the musician's work.
similarly compared "The Sun Comes Up Each Day" to Buckley and wrote that "Evening Song" "would now pass for acid-folk", whereas "The Anecdote of Horatio & Julie" is a cacophonous, electronic sound collage and "I Don't Know If It's You" is relatively more free form with aleatoric percussion.
[3] Stoughton recalled that he found the group name increasingly "somewhat derivative", and noted: "I told Jac I'd like to call the album Transformer.
[5][nb 3] Houghton wrote that the album's collage and free form material "deterred most listeners", while Stoughton recalled that many reviewers found the experimental tracks to be challenging, having expected a more traditional release from Elektra, adding: "Not surprisingly, people with conservative tastes disliked the extreme tracks, and people with extreme tastes were puzzled by the inclusion of conservative tracks", noting that Frank Zappa only enjoyed "Horatio & Julie" and suggested that Stoughton release an album of pure musique concrète.
[7] A reviewer for American Record Guide noted that the album exemplifies the "attractive idea" of writing a set of songs, arranging the musicians to perform them, and then recording a tape, which they deemed preferable to "holding a group of musicians together for long periods of time, finding work for them, and so on".
[12] David Cavanagh praised the inclusion of Stoughton alongside other obscure names like Alasdair Clayre and the Waphple, deeming it "serious archivist stuff", and described his song as "eerie toytown whimsy.
[14] In 2011, Uncut ranked it at number 23 their list of the 50 greatest "lost albums"; John Mulvey wrote that it had never been released on CD and vinyl copies were becoming rarer, but noted that it was due for digital re-release in mid-2011 to commemorate Elektra's 60th anniversary.
[1] In 2017, Uncut ranked the record at number 71 in their list of the "101 Weirdest Albums of All Time"; contributor Jim Wirth wrote that the record made Tim Buckley's "pretty extreme" Starsailor (1970) seem like "James Taylor-linear", writing that Stoughton's musical fusion "set Transformer's co-ordinates straight for the cut-out bins."
"[6] The 2015 re-release of Probe 10's There Is a Universe (1975) was marketed as being similar to an Elektra album, citing Transformer and Buckley's Starsailor; in his review for Record Collector, Mick Houghton wrote that "Stoughton's unclassifiable oddity isn't a bad call, particularly the operatic singing on the title track.