I got to thinking the other day about how incredibly odd it is that we keep free-roaming animals in our homes, little furry things that go about living their own lives as we go about ours, intersecting with us on the couch or at feeding time. I have two cats, and when I watch them on Sunday or in the evening during the week, it occurs to me that I have no idea what they are thinking or even the nature of their thoughts. We have no direct means of communication and even through our indirect means we can speak only in generalities like "No!" or "Meow" uttered with eyes fixed on the door that hides the food.
I mention this in conjunction with Zane Trow only because the other day when I was playing For Those Who Hear Actual Voices at home, the more vocal of my two cats began to sing along. Not really, of course, but he was mewing and howling as he often does and Trow's frequency modulations were coursing in their aquatic way through the room. The overall effect was as though the cat was somewhere in the recording, like some strange whale lost in Trow's deep sonic abyss. Last week, I was soaking in the album on the train and the sound of the warning that precedes the door to the rail car's closing rose from somewhere within the music. Bum-bum! It's not quite a perfect fourth, but it's close, and it coincided perfectly with the swell of the music-- I think it was track five, "Louder Sleep". I spent the rest of the day at work testing out how it sounded at a low volume in my cubicle, mixing with the constant overhead sound of the vents and the chatter of co-workers.
Although I couldn't always hear the album that well, looping as it was from the PC speaker under my desk, it would creep into my consciousness just often enough to give the day a profoundly different feeling from the others I've spent in that sterile tower. Pure FM synthesis has strange, unique qualities, and I've loved the sound ever since I first heard some of John Chowning's 1970s experiments with the technology. As academic as most of those recordings were, they still have a haunting beauty and natural logic to them, and that carries over into For Those Who Hear Actual Voices, which exploits similar techniques to beautiful results. The album has a graceful flow and almost supernatural glow that Trow heightens through subtle looping, delay, and laptop mulching.
The result is purely electronic music that feels like it could be a thousand years old; it has a permanence and the terrifying clarity of Caribbean shallows, where everything beside you is crystal clear, but the water's density causes objects to appear as if from nowhere in the distance. There are no tired, glitchy beasties coming out of that unknown here, though, and I'm grateful for that. For those familiar with the general aesthetic principles that guide most of the Room40 label's output, this will be yet another piece of nearly perfect ambient, and for the uninitiated, well, imagine what it'd be like to listen to a million shades of blue, and you're getting there.
