Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Voicehandler - Light From Another Light (Humbler, 2018)




Happy New Year and welcome to 2019!  I hope everyone had a swell conclusion to 2018, with moments of energy, love and light!  For me, I still have a stack of submissions from last year on my docket, so I’ll merrily continue to ingest and investigate them as the new year unfolds…

Light From Another Light is the sophomore full-length effort from Voicehandler, a Bay Area duo comprising vocalist/synthesist Danishta Rivero – half of noisy reggaetón duo Las Sucias – and drummer/percussionist Jacob Felix Heule, who many may recognize from his album with Bill Orcutt called Colonial Donuts.  Together the pair conjure up heavy duty clouds of free-form, catatonia-inducing madness perfect to drive away the winter blues.

The album arrives courtesy of Humbler Records, which I believe is a Heule-directed effort, as all of the label’s releases feature him in some way, shape or form.  It features a trio of extended live recordings from a prolific Spring period likely in the year the disc was released.  The first piece, “June 8”, immediately tears open the space-time continuum with frenetic drumming, gurgling modular synth vapors, and a glossolalia that is at time raw and guttural and at others processed into oblivion.  The spastic ripples emanate a sense of exalted abandon – beatific and bombastic all at once, arresting and entrancing simultaneously.  At the mid-point, Heule’s drumming takes center stage as Rivero’s vocals become shrouded in processing, and then a barely there crackle remains as the piece comes to a close.

“June 1” is a synth-forward exercise, more drone-based than its predecessor.  There is a percussive element present but it’s nearly obfuscated by the buzzy layers of synth.  The drones themselves seem to beat against each other as well, adding another layer of complexity to the proceedings.  Rivero’s voice slips in as a sampled element that is granularized and stretched out to the edges of a non-existent horizon.

“May 25” steps back into the territory mined by “June 8”, but in a more fully-realized form.  The piece is certainly noisy but there are shreds of delightful sanity revealing themselves throughout.  A buzzing drone appears amidst a series of drum rolls that may be meant to introduce an entity that never arrives.  The rolls peter out to reveal a cascade of synth/cymbal washes that vanish into the most introspective passages on display so far.  These final lowercase moments had me stretching my ears in an attempt to catch the subtlest of sonic events.

This gentle-not-gentle silver slab of sound is still available at the source, so direct yourself to the Humbler Bandcamp and prepare to be transported to unknown zones.