Dead Voices On Air
dadu: tutu:
self-released
From Download to Beehatch, from Gnome to Jamiel, Mark Spybey has never been gunshy when it comes to collaboration, within or beyond the Dead Voices On Air name under which the English experimentalist has been using for more than three decades to explore ambience, pure noise, or fractured approaches to dance, techno, and industrial. Now, coming off the heels of a groove-driven collaboration with undisputed legend Graham Lewis, Spybey returns with a second release done in concert with Martin Harvey and Stephen Weatherall operating under the mysterious moniker DADU (a collective? an obscure acronym? an incantation?), with Gary Widdowfield added to the fold for dadu: tutu:. A sprawling, chaotic affair stretching out more than two hours, it ushers a revelry of psych, krautrock, and garage rock into Spybey’s already big tent.
A piece like “Infenesation” gets the remit of the album across as well as anything else; a fuzzing yet oddly slinky interplay of squalling guitar and nodding bass flares up only to be drawn down into the murky undertow of shimmering synth ambience, and even further into abyssal feedback after resurfacing midway through. It’s a striking amount of movement and mood to be cycled through in less than four minutes, but that sort of structural experimental is part and parcel of dadu: tutu:‘s ethos (I’m not nearly enough of a Can aficionado to be able to pinpoint specific allusions, but they seem to hover about as muses throughout); some pieces are quick, slapdash riffs seemingly recorded off the cuff, others are glacially shifting tone poems of noise and feedback. Sure, both of those modes can be found in the earliest of DVOA work, the extra colour and texture added through the rock instrumentation places that freeform chaos in a new light.
Lo-fi and noisy yet structurally traditional covers of “Jeepster” and “Low Rider” (yes, that “Low Rider”) act as even more puzzling ingredients in the stone soup of the record, though the transposition of “Glassblower”, that immortal industrial club classic from another era of Spybey’s work, over to the rough and tumble rock that guides so much of dadu: tutu: makes for especially fascinating listening. Speaking of Download flashbacks, the daydreaming stream of consciousness which frames “Towards You In Your Silence Glide” as it shifts from pure ambience to space truckin’ grooves feels like an inversion of The Eyes Of Stanley Pain‘s “Suni C”, in which a clear-skied vision of utopia emerges out of a panicked and glitchy opening.
In contrast to the elegiac and crepuscular mood which has guided the last decade-plus of DVOA works, there’s an unmistakable sense of play and experimentation purely for fun and their own sake on dadu: tutu:. That isn’t to say there aren’t poignant and affecting moments – the Neu!-like interplay between choral pads and plaintive guitar on “Die Waschmaschine” has an emotional hook which belies its title’s wink at the thudding industrial percussion beneath it all. There’s also a reprise of “We Shall Overcome”, which recently appeared on :jamiel:spybey: but which cuts even deeper a year on given, well, everything. That those moments can find company with 70s AM Gold covers and the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink chaos is all part of the riddle and charm of Spybey’s approach to Dead Voices On Air, the door to which is still inviting and open after all these years.
