- An excellently uncanny follow-up from the elusive ambient duo—this time, it's not four hours long.
- Voice Actor's elusiveness is overshadowed only by their audacity. Noa Kurzweil and Levi Lanser's first album, Sent From My Telephone, was four hours and 30 minutes long, spread over 110 tracks that were arranged alphabetically—a gutsy release from a then-unknown act. That record (which this writer spent their winter holiday listening to from start to finish) was sent to the Belgium label Stroom over a three-year period, and became both an audio diary and a self-indulgent songwriting outlet. The length of the experimental ambient album meant that there was something for everyone: boom-bap, ambient sketches, even Drake samples. Last year, they released a condensed version, Fake Sleep, whose more palatable 16 tracks centre the sardonic noir of The Narcissist II-era Dean Blunt, the spacey eeriness of Boards of Canada's Music Has The Right To Children and the sombre world-building of Space Afrika (whom Voice Actor worked with on their brilliantly downcast joint album with Rainy Miller, A Grisaille Wedding).
Kurzweil opens "Slush 77"—an odd, rambling excursion that somehow leads to vegetable-filled slushy drink—with "I had a dream last night." It's a phrase that Voice Actor fans should be familiar with. Even when Kurzweil doesn't disclose that some of the blurry events on Fake Sleep were pulled from slumber, she retains the idle vocals of someone recounting their dream while rubbing sleep from their eyes. These sedate vocals make her spoken word both irresistible and unnerving, as she enunciates her Dutch-accented words so slowly and carefully that spit bubbles audibly burst in-between consonants.
It's the same voice that makes the absurd scenery of these songs all the more uncanny. In "Camden," she details a strange encounter with shaky vocals in a cloud of reverb and delay that presents everything in double vision. The story progresses in intensity—a woman slaps her on a double-decker bus in the London borough of Camden, and once Kurzweil leaves the vehicle, she realises that a helicopter has crashed into the road. The same deceptive mooniness is applied to "Daydream," in which a fantasy of a cuddling session takes a kinky turn. Wind instruments bleat unevenly while a childlike voice putters in the background. The production's fuzziness is a stark contrast to Kurzweil's nonchalance as she utters that being choked in bed was "violence... but con-sen-sual violence."
There's little information available online about Kurzweil. According to Discogs, she once performed indie folk music as Supertalented and released albums Weight Watchers and Plus Size in the late '00s—the latter of which is described as "shorter, stronger and more suitable for Hell's Angels. More songs about cheesecakes and less about potatoes." The barebones lyrics she writes as Voice Actor are about everything, relying on intuitive bedroom pop hooks and quiet, albeit strange chunks of life. On "Shoulder Length," she vividly describes a time she shoplifted as a child. A bleary-eyed loop dissipates into the ether as she hesitantly closes her confessional monologue like it's a question: "That's the last time we shoplifted... this shop?"
The album's immersive, collage-like production also contributes to Fake Sleep's elegant mystique. On "Let U Go," a far away Kurzweil warbles a simple refrain—"I don't want to let you go"—in the eye of a sonic maelstrom. Thunder crackles, a wooden rocking chair creaks and lo-fi chords float away. While the echo of Kurzweil's words sounds enticing, the turbulent world built around her suggests we run in the opposite direction. On "Stand Tall," a recording plays in the background, a reel clicks and the loop returns to the start. Kurzweil speaks with the positive lilt of a cheery adult on a children's show. The response? A decaying drone that moans in the murky background like a petulant child.
This sense of placelessness appears in a more relaxed form on songs like "Myself to Myself," where prismatic bleeps flower alongside 40 seconds of a hushed poem sung as modestly as someone attempting to sing from memory. "What It's Worth" is similarly hazy, the namesake chorus laid down in the midst of bleepy dream pop like a linen blanket in the gentle heat of an August afternoon. Vocals fade in and out of the song's underbelly, channelling the meandering whimsy of Lush's 1994 album, Split.
Still, this dream montage ends with an unsettling nightmare. On "Pelli," Kurzweil—who up until then, speaks in English—slurs her words in another language. When she goes quiet, poignant chords rise from smoky drones along with slices of disturbing New York Fire Department dispatch tapes from September 11th. The resulting dissonance of beauty and dread is comparable to the invasive gorgeousness of Coil's "Who'll Fall." After its end, the album's liner notes become fully clear. In it, Fake Sleep is compared to a mirror-filled pavilion, where "visitors can be seated on large rocks and have the surprising pleasure of hearing tear-stained but triumphant hearts sing."
Tracklist01. HHBYTL feat. Yarrow.co
02. SLUSH 77
03. U Projected 2
04. Daydream
05. Let U Go
06. Camden
07. What It's Worth
08. Stand Tall
09. Freefall
10. False Glistening
11. Minefields
12. Exposed
13. Closer
14. Myself 2 Myself
15. Shoulder Length
16. Pelli