When it comes to an album like Voice Actor's Sent from my Telephone, there really isn't a single point of entry or an appropriate frame of mind with which to engage with it. It's a project that more or less overwhelms attempts to provide context or synopsis. The 4 1/2-hour record is comprised of more than a hundred tracks which were recorded and produced by Noa Kurzweil and Levi Lanser over a three-year period, and was originally meant to be a radio play of sorts- a drama that one tunes into nightly to catch the latest cliff hanger between Ovaltine and detergent ad copy reads. At some point, the production became overgrown and rebelled, escaping the confines of its concept, like a mutant ficus plant that has started growing up the walls and prying up the floorboards with its roots... and Noa and Levi apparently never felt compelled to prune it back or attempt to tame it. The wild behemoth at the center of this little shop of subtle horrors is the result of their nurturing and emboldening negligence, a disembodied aggregation of hailing drone transmissions, spoken word poetry jamming, cracked baroque accompaniments, Tourettes afflicted triphop, plunderphonics prestidigitation, cathode ray lobotomies, and uranium-plated R'nB loops- offering vignettes into the modern industrial world, not as it appears, but as it really exists in the subcutaneous layers of our chemically peeled and badly scarred psyches. Each song is like a little piece of a hyper-noir you half remember from a broadcast on a now-defunct classic movie channel, taking on the guise of a surrealist psycho-drama through the pulverizing process of years of mingling with repressed memories and forced recollections- minced, rolled, and served like suspiciously warm sushi at an all you can eat buffet with an adjoining rest stop. There is no contiguous order to the 109 tracks other than the fact that they are mixed in alphabetical order by title, leaving the story, to the extent that it is decipherable, about as orderly as a toupee being rung through a taffy puller. If you're up for it, I recommend that you listen to the album as it was originally intended, thirty minutes at a time, over the course of several evenings. That way, you can digest enough of its jealously guarded secrets and mutilated memorandum to begin to trace an outline of a narrative through mediation on its frayed tendrils. Each track calls out to you in a mismatched, exhorting tone, pleading for relief; it's up to you to play detective and mortician and piece the scraps back together until they once again resemble something human.
* In March I am writing a fresh album review every day inspired by a different color. Today's color grey inspired my review of Voice Actor's album because its one of those deals that requires you to flex a little grey matter.
