Dead Voices on Air
(Copyright © 1999-2024 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
New Words Machine , 7/10
Hafted Maul , 5/10
Shap , 4/10
How Hollow Heart , 4/10
Fire In The Bronx Zoo , 4/10
Piss Frond , 4/10
Frankie Pett Presents, 4/10
Propeller: Rame , 6/10
Propeller: Oro , 6/10
Frankie Pett Presents , 6/10
Links:

If English is your first language and you could translate my old Italian text, please contact me. Mark Spybey, sciolti gli Zoviet France e trasferitosi a Vancouver, nel 1993 ha dato vita al progetto Dead Voices On Air.

Su New Words Machine (Hypnotic, 1995) tenta una fusione di modi industriali e ambientali. Per venti minuti Dream Catcher non fa altro che riciclare rumori piallandone le asperita`. E` una prassi che negli undici minuti conclusivi di Vuls, fra droni sempre piu` lancinanti, raggiunge livelli spasmodici di angoscia.

Sulle tredici vignette strumentali di Hafted Maul (Invisible, 1995) Spybey si lascia pero` prendere la mano dal suo metodo di sovrapposizione e risulta spesso prolisso come lo erano stati i Zoviet France. I "rumori trovati" e gli accordi sparuti degli strumenti potrebbero comporre una suggestiva colonna sonora della civilta` urbana, ma Spybey non riesce a trascendere il documentario.

Poi, come troppo spesso accade in Gran Bretagna, arriveranno album a valanga: Shap (Invisible, 1996), con Zev Asher dei Nimrod, un esperimento di manipolazione della voce umana, How Hollow Heart (Invisible, 1996), nel vetusto stile horror-industriale, Fire In The Bronx Zoo (Invisible, 1997), una collaborazione con David Wright dei Not Breathing che remixa composizioni di entrambi, Piss Frond (Invisible, 1998), un doppio album di "canzoni" che copre un territorio stilistico enorme (persino trip-hop), Frankie Pett Presents The Happy Submarines (Invisible, 2000).

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Propeller is an avantgarde collective from Vancouver (Canada) led by Mark Spybey. The project started with Rame (Scratch, 1996), a bold collage of sounds and voices that secretes a surreal ambience. More a notebook than a record, it proved that a musician can create music out of the manipulation of all sorts of sonic sources.

A much more organic approach made Oro (Scratch, 1998) a milestone recording in its genre, a zoo of processed sounds and an elegant fashion parade of lo-fi ambience. It opens with an ambient concert for burbling noises, distant metallic vibrations and a slow piano song. Then a loud distortion is circled by a whirling buzz; the third track lets reverbed beats drown into a maelstrom of ghostly electronics; the fifth dilates Eric Pounder's vocal improvisations into a cosmic drone; The seventh piece is almost a baroque fugue played with a new age nonchalance, a cello-like fluctuation counterpointing a harp-like tinkling. The eleventh conceives a tribal beat out of radio frequencies. The 18th's extended notes have a somber quality, like in an organ requiem.
The eight is a lengthy study on slowly-mutating drones that only towards the end reveals the voices hidden within them. The 14th has a similar development but pivots on changing timbres.

Spybey also collaborated to A Peripheral Bluer with James Plotkin and to Bad Roads Young Drivers with Mick Harris.

By leveraging on so many years of experiments, with Frankie Pett Presents (Invisible, 2001) Dead Voices On Air has achieved a "cinematic" or "photographic" quality: the apparently anarchic, unfocused strings of sounds that compose a song are actually details of a scene, usually a squalid, harrowing one. Case in point: We Fire Cotton, Sweet Garbage Streets.

What is unique about this music database