Customer Reviews

Shap

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Shap is a fine disc, it was the first I heard by DVOA and remains a favorite. The ambience is strange and often noisy; most of the tracks are relatively short, so there is a diverse variety of material. The combination of aesthetic elements in many of the tracks is rather unique, although the resonant vocal murmurs are a little overused. Still, if you're looking for something strange and oddly atmospheric, dip in.

Mark Spybey may insist that Dead Voices on Air is not ambient music, and while he is, at least in my opinion, obviously wrong, he does manage to make ambient music of a different kind of character.

First and foremost, in the grand tradition of the Zoviet France records like "Loh Land" or "Just An Illusion", "Shap" is for those who enjoy 'alien' sounds. The feeling is that the listener has traversed into some mysterious, cavernous beyond with, at very least, no sympathy for human kind, but on occasion, obvious malevolence. It's up to the listener whether any old ruins or signs of life are encountered.

Drones and simplistic, not-quite-looped, naturalistic rhythms are the basic building blocks of the sound. Familiar noises such as voices and horns are processed into hypnotic, reverberant ostinato; stereo space is used quite effectively. The listener is enveloped in a textural womb of sound that seems decidedly claustrophobic and disorienting, as opposed to huge, ancient, slowly drifting or in any way evoking oceans or outer space, as much ambient does. The sound palette is not afraid to venture into the scratchier, harsher realms, but never becomes all out noise, or really all that unpleasant. You'll still only find this relaxing if you're really weird.

Unlike Zoviet France, here Spybey doesn't care about remaining lo-fi, a quality which arguably made the Zoviet France albums all the more mysterious in sound. "Shap" uses its higher fidelity sound to create a more immersive environment, to let the listener forget that the sounds on the album have been recorded, to let the listener believe these sounds simply surround them as they would if they were encountered in any environment of some kind as opposed to being played from a CD.

All 21 tracks of "Shap" are a seamless trip, and there's plenty of diversity within the theme to keep it interesting. I found the album to be easily listenable as a whole, and occasionally even wish there was more of it, but hey, there's plenty of DVoA albums. As always with Spybey, too, it's the whole package. The art is great and fits marvelously.

I'd recommend listening to this while reading some kind of literature that evokes similar images to what I described above... Anything surreal will do. "Les Chants de Maldoror" did it for me.

Highly recommended. 5 stars.

Hey, wait a minute - what's going on here? This is easily the most disconcerting album I've heard. Odd noises loosely grouped together in tracks with names like 'eadiglice" and "papa papa repe wax" transit each other like asttological forces, leaving inscrutable signs and portents of stranger things to come. Not pretentious or alienating, just alien.