quoted from the article:
“Throughout a class of genres and micro-genres, there seems to be a new musical vocabulary emerging, one centered around the way vocals are being manipulated to create moods and atmospheres defined by their amorphous, often spectral nature. Ghost voices. It’s something like what happened in the film Inception, the way music could be heard through layers of dreams. That effect— as though sound were floating through several walls of consciousness, its outlines blurred to be almost unidentifiable— has something to do with the fact that we’ve heard a lot of these vocals before in their original form; they’re often samples that have been resurrected and re-articulated to express a sort of new slang. You can hear it in dance music and hypnagogic pop, in witch house, drone, and art rock, the various presentations just as disparate as they are interconnected.
Few artists at the moment are experimenting with the vocal more aggressively than 22-year-old London producer James Blake, who’s used the dodgier end of dubstep as a starting point from which he can take the human voice apart piece-by-piece, putting everything back together again in new, incandescent forms. Classically trained but a child of the 1990s, Blake has played around with turn-of-the-century R&B vocal terrain, most memorably those of Aaliyah and Kelis. “Vocals have sentimental value… and I’ve always wanted to sample things that I already love,” Blake told XLR8R in June. “Nowadays those [R&B] vocals really sit in your subconscious…. I think using them taps into a massive subconscious in our generation…. People don’t just want to hear them straight; they want to hear echoes of them in their dance music.” We hear echoes of music history in nearly everything we put to our ears, but this particular form of expression has extra resonance because of how our brains process the voice. It connects those who hear to one another, and also draws lines between memories.
The marriage we hear now between dance music and julienned R&B vocal samples nods to the work of Burial and his now landmark 2007 album, Untrue. Not merely an impossibly haunting update on UK garage and two-step at time of its release, Untrue has also become a blueprint for many artists hoping to conjure equally murky, impenetrable, self-encompassing atmospherics. “I wanted to make a glowing record, I wanted to cheer myself up,” Burial’s Will Bevan told The Wire in December of that year. “I was listening to these [A] Guy Called Gerald tunes. I wanted to do vocals, but I can’t get a proper singer like him. So I cut up a cappellas and made different sentences, even if they didn’t make sense, but they summed up what I was feeling.”
Bevan built melodic foundations out of androgynous whispers, sample reconstructions that shapeshifted and evaporated above the crackle of slow rain and dark, growling bass. But vocal manipulation itself isn’t new, nor is the style of shadowed, nocturnal tones that color so much of dubstep. If you wanted you could draw lines from T-Pain to Kanye to Todd Edwards to Prefuse 73 and on back, with stops along the way for Luomo’s Vocalcity, the KLF’s Chill Out, Kraftwerk’s vocodered melodies, King Tubby’s dub, and Steve Reich’s tape experiments. But what we’re hearing now, as framed by Burial and articulated further by James Blake, is the synthesis of 90s trip-hop, British dance music from jungle to 2-step to rave, and forward-thinking R&B, especially the eerie melodies penned for Aaliyah by Steven “Static Major.” Much of Untrue, like the music it seems to have inspired, is simultaneously urban and monastic. “Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people, you let it in, you’re more open to it,” Bevan explained to The Wire. “Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.”
These voices seem to reinforce the feeling of isolation, of being sealed away in a recording with voices that inevitably take on qualities of your own choosing and interpretation. It’s not just that we complete them, but that we translate them, too. Here are some of the most compelling coded transmissions from the past few years.”
