Das Fieber der Menschlichen Stimme

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It has been called the most perfect instrument. Little wonder, then, that the human voice has always fascinated electroacoustic artists. Shaped by the convergence of sonicism's most prized elements - vibration, pitch, consonance, breath, acoustics, inflection - voice's constituent qualities offer limitless possibility for manipulation and experimentation. For musicians such as Klangkrieg's Tim Buhre and Felix Knoth, the dissection of vocal patterns, as through the distillation of voice into its sonic and rhythmic constituents, uncovers the machine logic behind the biomechanics of speech. We like to think of our extraordinary vocal capabilities as one of those characteristics which has vaulted us above all other species. But voice is just as much the missing link between machine and man. What is voice, in its truest sense, but the audible output of extremely precise machinery? Appending meaning and emotion to sound complicate its essential nature. Divorced from context, pared down to a matter of vibrational nuances and sheared of all associations, voice is just the sound of a complex instrument that simultaneously belongs to the string, wind and percussive families. Can voice ever truly be isolated from meaning? Content and context indivisible are the roots of language and voice its primary tool. Electroacoustic music, with its particular methods of reduction, distortion, recontextaulization and isolation, fuses scientific distance and artistic intent. This allows for a unique perspective on voice - one in which the dyad of sound and meaning isn't necessarily inviolable. Sound can be just sound, its source immaterial, any preexisting connotations irrelevant. Whether through the displacement of context which occurs in musique concrète and digital sampling, or by the infusion of alien tonalities through layering, filtering and processing, sound is reducible. In this sense, voice is no different from any other pigment or artistic material. Klangkrieg treat voice as a palette and work from there. With the emphasis on an abstract sonic vocabulary of wordless chatterings and pitch-shifted squeaks, they don't get too caught up in patterns of speech; though there are remnants of formal construction in some of the sentence-like arrangements of rumbling quasi-words. And the decomposition of coherent speech into sparrow-like sing-song burble on "Anormales Geräusch" finds the music hidden just below the surface of conversation. From this music, or at least from its foundation of intoned drones, "Flieger in Großer Spirale" extracts crackles, a heavy buzz and orchestral whorls of acousmatic sound. "Kürsprecher" and "Schönes Gefühl" fake short dialogues and cohesive narratives with chopped-up and reassembled scraps of radio broadcast. But Klangkrieg do not limit themselves to words. All vocal sounds - guttural, labial, glottal, lingual - are game, and some of their most fascinating work is in the synthesis of word-like noises from such components, requiring that you constantly question what you're hearing. As the title track plays, doubts accrue. Are those really numbers being counted? Is that the purr of a machine or a string of reiterated phonemes? Moreover, considering the flexibility and versatility of the human voice, how many of the sounds heard on this CD - as phantom melodies, subsonics, illusory saxophone solos, the fluttering feedback and whistles, avian and rodent babble - aren't even the result of processing? The most provocative artists are those who make you think, and Klangkrieg definitely keep you guessing. They may even change the way you think each time you open your mouth to speak. Or sing. Or just belch.