reviews See the discography informations on this release Read more reviews of this release From: CMJ New Music Monthly, March, 1995 by: David Jarman Artist: Dead Voices on Air Album: Hafted Maul Label: Invisible Remember a time when industrial music didn't mean an arena full of Doc Martens-clad teenaged moptops along with Trent Reznor, but rather formless, toneless beatless, surreal clumps of found sound and machine generated noise? (I personally was in elementary school at the time, so don't feel bad if you don't.) Mark Spybey certainly does; at the time, he was a member of Zoviet France, one of the pioneering groups of the industrial avant-garde, a group so obsessed with dismantling the usual signifiers of popular music that at first it refused to name their works or even the band members, and packaged its music not in record sleeves but with materials such as aluminum foil and plywood. Spybey recently moved from the UK to Canada, but his efforts to displace neatly-packaged music with improvised, layered agglomerations of sounds from primitive 'instruments' continue on, under the guise of Dead Voices on Air; what began as idle kitchen improvisations sessions with fellow Vancouverites Skinny Puppy's cevin Key appears on Hafted Maul) instead evolved into another full-scale project for Spybey. The resulting album is a disconcerting listen for an audience expecting any sorts of simple landmarks like a riff, a beat, a vocal, or even an identifiable instrument - but then, that's precisely what Spybey would want.

(doing) (being) (melding)