Dave Phillips
Homo Animalis
SWITZERLAND SCHIMPFLUCH ASSOCIATES SHA 01 2 x CD (2014)
Dave Phillips is a sound artist, vocalist, musician from Switzerland; he crosses performance, sound and field recording. Listening a few times to this double CD, despite the dark side to its aesthetics : the subject is quite dark in itself : the humanimal, mutation and violence of an impossible mutation, we are left wondering why a young artist such as Phillips (relatively young but still in his forties) need to re-release some of his works on a CD. It would probably be more convincing to release some unreleased early works rather than works that have been produced only a couple of years before their “re-releasing”. I suppose what we are trying to understand here is what is the point of this double CD release of the work of an artist on his own label of his own recently released music? Perhaps it’s for his personal archive! Great, but give us something we haven’t heard already!
Apart from this little irk, the music is absolutely beautiful! Bassy, breathy and “animal” noises made with voice, well-composed in his relation to the mutation of human and animal and landscape using voices, sound poetry and field recordings: pitched groans and rocky super male crooners turn into a rather dodgy bull which is about to explode in millions of little insects, like a dead body re-incarnated with the grace of black magic, of a dead science everyone forgets. Dave Phillips is a master of bringing you to where dark magic and trance prevails, in a kingdom of suffering and transformation.
A. BAUGE