Voice Actor’s music buzzes like a brain. It vibrates, oscillates, turns strange stimuli into electrical waves. Their 2022 album Sent From My Telephone sometimes felt less like music than neural entrainment: a gargantuan sketchbook, nearly four and a half hours long, blending spoken-word poetry, distorted samples, and noirish drones. That epic transmission confirmed Voice Actor—originally the duo of Noa Kurzweil and Levi Lanser, who left the group before the album’s release—as one of the most mysterious acts on Belgian’s outsider-music label Stroom. Now Kurzweil has teamed up with Squu—an obscure Welsh producer who has released 39 songs on Bandcamp over the past four years; most of his SoundCloud streams are in the low single digits—on Lust (1), a more concentrated shot of sensual ambient with soft gestures of two-step and downbeat dub. It sustains the sublime and keeps it in abeyance like a long, drawn-out orgasm. This is music of a primitive, delirious, and delightfully exhausted state.
Across the album’s 45 minutes, Squu’s lustrous pads spread out horizontally, blushing like wine, while Kurzweil voice commands a remote and romantic authority. It’s an unlikely harmony. Lust (1) glimmers with melodic rapture even when it’s jolted by metallic clangs and percussive glitches or by Kurzweil’s oaky consonation. Vague ambience and gritty details complement rather than negate each other: the metallic birdsong meeting low bass drones on “You,” or the syncopated clicks falling in with the heavenly arpeggio of “Rattle.” With each small inflection of timbre and breath, a powerful shift in mood.
The album gracefully alternates between floaty ambient sketches and well-whetted pulses. “dYn,” with its deconstructed swing, sounds like the inside of a marathon runner’s faltering lungs, while “Fields” simply sighs along with its sweet, beatless motif and atonal embellishments. But even in its vaguest and most abstract moments, Lust (1) possesses sharp expressive powers. It impresses like a bruise of unsure origin. Despite the centrality of words, it resists meaning. It mimics that state of good sex when thresholds explode and all logic flushes out. Kurzweil renders words tactile, onomatopoeic. Her voice is largely unintelligible, often mixed very low, yet even when she articulates more clearly, her words still retain a soupy quality. “Your hands around my neck,” she repeats coolly on two-stepper “Nekk,” the k reverberating and bubbling like yonic clicks, a kind of gynecological ASMR. Kurzweil forfeits meaning to phonemes, making her abstractions glow even more keenly.
Lust (1) follows the narrative arc of a slowly depixelating image, and anything even approaching language, logic, or clarity only begins to gather by the last song. On “Barbara,” the album’s outro, Kurzweil speaks for the first time in full sentences with clear, unambiguous meanings. What does she have to say for herself? “Barbara Walters was a condescending, ignorant, arrogant snob,” she intones, referencing Walters’ antagonistic interview with Dolly Parton in 1977. It’s the kind of thing someone says aloud exactly halfway between REM states and waking: logically sound but contextually absurd. That’s the sort of register needed, Kurzweil and Squu have found, to convey the essence of dreams. It’s a mode of communication beyond words.
