Barbershop is a well-known, though hopelessly kitsch and minimally enjoyable, example, but the art has also been adopted into genres like hip hop, where rappers may be supported by beat boxers alone, and pop (Björk’s 2004 album Medúlla, consisting nearly entirely of voice samples, is a prime example). In avant-garde, the approach is neither new, yet there especially the possibilities are manifold, since the end result need not sound, by any traditional sense of the word, musical. At one end of the spectrum we find a compilation such as Mouth Noise, released through XV Parówek’s label XVP in 2008, for which artists used the mouth alone to construct deafening noise bursts. At the other end, we find Lovesliescrushing’s CRWTH (Chorus Redux).

Back in 2007 Lovesliescrushing, an ambient/shoegaze outfit hailing from Tucson, Arizona, released their album Chorus through Peruvian label Automatic Entertainment. Chorus, as the name already seems to imply somewhat, was constructed entirely of voice samples, which Scott Cortez – also of the decidedly noisier shoegaze outfit Astrobrite – spliced at the phoneme level, after which the phonemes were reworked, treated, looped, layered to create entirely new compositions in which the voice became a stream of sound your ears couldn’t decipher as speech, or in which you couldn’t even recognize specific phonemes, a stream of unrecognizable, ethereal vowels framed and portioned by as unrecognizable consonantal clicks.

CRWTH (Chorus Redux) is a reworking of the criminally limited Chorus (which was released in an edition of 500, as is CRWTH, by the way), and the goal of the reworking was, as per the (spot-on, I have to say) liner notes, “to abstract even further upon an abstraction”. And indeed, Cortez, deconstructing and reconstructing meticulously voice samples from band mate Melissa Aprin-Duimstra and himself, seems to have succeeded at that very well – and, in the process, has created a redux album that easily outshines the original. Whoever is familiar with the original Chorus knows that that album was filled to the brim with layers of voice piled upon another to create a particularly shoegazy type of ambient, certainly beautiful but also confrontational, in a sense – ambient crashing into you with full force, sooner bringing to mind the ethereally noisy aesthetics of My Bloody Valentine than the soft-spoken dreaminess of Loscil.

CRWTH is a decidedly more soft-spoken album, though; silent, calm, precious. The walls of voice as they were found on Chorus are a thing of the past, and instead we find hushed compositions, sometimes bordering on the inaudible, pushing slowly forward and working toward no particular climax, instead staying subdued and intangible. It seems to betray some influence of Richard Chartier, who commissioned CRWTH; Chartier’s works, of course, are probably the prime example of ambient music’s effective use of silence. That hushed quality, exactly, is what makes CRWTH so beautiful – whereas its mother album was something to enjoy, this is something to love. Whereas Chorus was an album that was superficially pretty, CRWTH is one that is haunting and engulfing in every single way. Not entirely surprisingly, the tracks now and then bear some resemblance to Gregorian chants. To tracks like DZAI and FLRM, there’s an almost religious feel, a sense that whatever is communicated through the reconstructed fragments of voice is something superhuman,  sounding of age, wisdom and divine beauty.

CRWTH (Chorus Redux) is singularly amazing, with the new material surpassing the original material in every which way. Seeing as Chorus, however, was already excellent, it should tell you something about how astonishing this album is. A truly, highly recommended album, which furthermore comes with a free download link to Chorus, for us listeners to contrast, compare, adore. Another excellent release on Line, a division of Taylor Deupree’s brilliant 12k label, that should simply not be missed.