“A haunting combination of strings and field recordings. There’s a strong sense of sorrow coming out of these aged tones, crying out quietly with no real beginning or end.”
Anthony Fantano, The Needle Drop
“A gorgeous process: meticulously composed, looped, developed, and finally broken down. Hargreaves is a master.”
Tiny Mix Tapes
Manchester composer and musician Andrew Hargreaves (a founding member of The Boats) brings his acclaimed Tape Loop Orchestra project to Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint with the hissed-out choral elegance of new album Voix de Sabbat.
“The voice is something I keep returning to,” Hargreaves writes. “Disembodied voices, secondary vocalisation, borrowed voices, and the reproduced voice. Can a machine be made to reproduce something that is made to seem human but isn’t?” Like a spectral choir communing from a transversal plane, Hargreaves’ newest outing under his Tape Loop Orchestra guise Voix de Sabbat is an uncanny and experiential immersion into strange but beguiling depths. It explores “the gap between a sound and it being heard, and where meaning is encoded in this process. The shadow of a sound, and how something can be reduced, distorted, but still carry the essence of its message and intent.”
Over two longform pieces, Voix de Sabbat traces repetition, gradual dissolution, repetition, gradual dissolution, and the narrative interplay that binds the two together. Throughout, Hargreaves’ characteristic mist-laden shimmer and subtle employment of shadow, apparition, and lassitude breathes life into a gently nuanced interzone between spectral choral voice and impressionist tape blur. A subtly unsettling nostalgia unfolds through the ghostwatching, while motes and artefacts of melodic pathos appear in distant, half-imagined, or near-imperceivable whispers. “Sometimes we need something outside ourselves to remind us of our connection to the world and each other,” Hargreaves offers. Though part of this music, or at least its compositional palette, is derived from voice, Tape Loop Orchestra’s treatment and process renders it meaningfully and arrestingly beyond the human.
Opener “Voix Figées” revels in foggy moor hermitude and a detached romanticism, its cycles of hiss and echoes osmosing between the corporeal and spiritual. The “frozen” voices of its title are glassy, lucid, and runic, filling a space in which time has stopped. Haunted string lines and eventually reverberate piano join, and the piece could be mournful, or even majestic, but instead it occupies a sacred place, both mysterious and knowing.
Next, “Voix Empruntées” reflects the “the process of preserving sound and the additional artefacts (surface noise, hiss, hums etc), reminding us that we are listening to a “real fake, made from real elements but constructed” (to borrow a phrase from Luc Ferrari).” It is more outwardly elegiac than its sibling, centred on lilting and lamenting piano phrases conjured from an ancient and holy unreality. As disembodied choral voice enters, so does a light, and Hargreaves’ effortless harnessing of wistful remembrance floods the senses.
