The human voice is louder than ever. What it can achieve with digital cosmetics is nearly boundless, but molding it into poignant shapes remains an elusive goal. Scissor Lock – Sydneysider Marcus Whale – has sculpted two versions of his own voice. One version sings a song, the other invokes its containing world. On Broken English, his second vocal-only release, these two worlds collide, with the resulting big bang playing the starring role.

Digital processing can turn any source into a perennial drift, a truth we’ve reached after a decade’s deluge of private press drone recordings. But sound and tone for its own sake needn’t be opaque and it needn’t be formal. Mutating the voice is easy, as Whale demonstrates, but how to disembody the voice and maintain its soul, when there’s no other source against which it can be contrasted? Broken English is too arresting to be ambient music but too sedate to be pop. It’s unassertive in both respects. These four texturally dependent pieces are contagious, dramatic, often lyrical, but the result is that neither itch can be satisfactorily scratched. There’s the subliminal essence of a song in each of these long passages: the sense of a real voice struggling against a tumult of sound and information. In this way it’s redolent of shoegaze divorced from that genre’s restrained rock bravado. Something is burrowing from beneath.

But the absence of a payoff for listeners expecting either/or, means that Broken English inhabits its own faded space. The audible lyrics are simple illustrative phrases, typically depicting hills, seas, supernatural glows. There’s always a direct correlation between sound and word, in the way murmurs crash against the shore, or aspirant falsettos climb to the top of a hill. In this way, maybe Broken English is about as fashionable as a landscape painting. It transplants narrative with image and presents a kind of pastoral nostalgia, the sadness of a generation staring at its own artificial Polaroids. All these layered voices culminate in a muted and disorientated sigh, and you understand.

by Shaun Prescott