Voafose: Voafose

Jeremy Simmonds is probably best known as one half of early Leaf Label signee Boymerang, but he’s been around for years, ducking in and out of the shadows of British experimental electronica to remix, advise, and collaborate. Now, having collected various tape manipulations, detuned broadcasts, and eerie drones for over 20 years, Simmonds has compiled a selection for his first solo album as Voafose. Predictably, given the long production cycle, the results are a little scattered, with adjacent tracks often wildly disconnected. While much of Simmonds’s material is based in rather rote exercises in tweaking regular sampled voices and music, he gets his best results when he breaks his sounds into their most basic and unrecognizable constituents, layering them into sparse, burbling studies in ambient space, as in the quasar pulses of “Threpton”, or the digested noise of “Wooden League”. At other times, like “Woolard”‘s extended tape delay, results are effective but by now seem basic and dated. Worse, nearly half the tracks are little more than irritating warped spoken word. Hopefully we’ll hear something a little more focused in somewhat less than another 20 years.