UK player Mark Spybey used to be in Zoviet France in the 1980s, a well-loved and seemingly quite influential project who (like many operating in this area) were a bit hard to pin down personnel-wise and went through a few lineup changes as they emitted their mysterious ethereal tones.
I was never a true disciple of the Zoviets, but it would be foolish to ignore the shadow cast across experimental culture by these pioneering types from the northern UK realms – that’s my excuse anyway for not knowing the name of Dead Voices On Air, whose Abrader Redux (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR320CD) we have before us today – it’s a reissue / rejig of the original thing from 1993, the first release from this act which comprised our man Spybey and a fellow named cEvin Key. Said Key is also something to do with Skinny Puppy and both he and Spybey were in another industrial act called Download. In fact all the band names in this list could probably carry the “industrial” tag without attracting too much controversy. The original Abrader made its way into the cold, uncaring world on a Japanese label called G.R.O.S.S., run by Aube, and since there were only 50 copies it’s become very “collectable” since then – even the second edition commands about 100 bones to the cognoscenti with deep pockets. I see there were just three tracks on that taperoo, but today’s item is fully loaded with seven blasters – which information I pass on as a warning to the curious – most o’ these bonus monsters seem to have first surfaced on a double CD reissue Fast Falls The Eventide from Lens Records, but today Cold Spring offer us two more previously-unheard lumps of aural coal from the golden year of 1994.
Well, so much for that convoluted history. This has proven to be a very dense and powerful listen which true to its name acts like an “abrasive” piece of sandpaper, or mechanical grinding device, which can play havoc with surfaces of brain and other vital organs. I particularly enjoyed – or survived – the original three cuts from ‘Concretion’ to ‘Hafted Maul’ because they seem so completely blanked out as well as dense, so many layers obscuring other layers, a vast black / grey abstract painting where all the paint is smeared, then somehow fitted on top of another such ten paintings in the studio. Chokehold on windpipe and can’t breathe while listening to these as we glimpse a coruscating vision o’ despair, that’s neither noise nor not-noise. Applaud single-mindedness of Spybey 1994 version as it takes a singular vision to adhere to this kind of keel-hauling. You can call this “dark ambient”, but they don’t come much darker and it’s extremely original too. Full marks from the reaper’s scythe.
Then somehow both relieved and disappointed by bonus cut ‘Papa Papa Revers’ with its rhythm loops somehow resembling a negativo-version of Rapoon (which happens to be another Zoviets spin-off) and what’s this? A melody of some kind bleakly emanating from a synth of keyboard? Unnecessary. This thinking, or something like, seems to have blighted ‘Honour Boe’ too, with its looped voice parts depicting a warped choir of warped monks, but their magical chant doesn’t make it off the first spin of the prayer wheel. Back to form however with ‘Water Waeter’, which plunges us back into the expected dungeon of hate and futile chains, and somehow puts one in mind of Bowie’s ‘Sense Of Doubt’ remade for the anti-chillout room group of renegades (said to have plagued Hackney clubs in the 1990s). Good music for having the roof of the caverns collapsing on your unprotected head. If it’d been up to me, I’d have ended the disc on that note, but the editors think otherwise – and subject us to 6:20 mins of ‘Gassbag’ with its shrill and insufferable steel webs of jangly trebly noise.
Dead Voices On Air had a logo or sigil (par for the course for this stage of industrial types) comprising six monoliths in a row all set to cancel your feelings of hope, said logo proudly emblazoned on front of original tape, relegated to back cover of digipak here. Front cover photo is now a rabbit hole reminding us of the original “landscape painting” intentions of this music, while reminding us that we’re about to be dragged to the lower depths. From 24th October 2022.