Voice Imitator

Voice Imitator

Of How Hits

12xu

***“In attempting to write this dispatch on the second Voice Imitator album my instinct is to pitch them as somewhat of an antidote to the current ills of what could be described as the post-Noise Rock landscape. I’m trying not to tread too far down the path of negativity and slander, so let's just say that while on paper they share basic characteristics with popular groups in the pigfuck to frat rock pipeline, Voice Imitator possess a tact and vision scantly seen in Repetition Orientated Rock.” “On ‘Of How Hits’ the members decades long individual and collaborative experiences in punk/rock, the avant-garde and electronic music, are further honed to form an internal logic that doesn’t merely cut and paste from these experiences, but creates a distinctive and singular group sensibility. Self conscious subcultural baggage is removed from past youth music experiences, only the molten core remains.” “With each listen the distinction between traditional band and synthesized modes becomes harder to distinguish, like a zoomed in Killing Joke welding itself to Robert Hood’s technominimalism. Lyrics reflect the surreal banailty and horrors of modern existence, like a co- worker recapping their interstate trip away to the Banksy exhibition. The album ender, ‘On Cloud Nine As One Of Three Percent’ can only be compared to Lou Reed and Metallica’s ‘Junior Dad’. In short, affecting contemporary music.” - Nic Warnock

Voice Imitator

Plaza

12xu

***Voice Imitator is the collaborative project of Per Bystrom, Justin Fuller, Mark Groves, and Leon O’Regan. All four have been active as part of numerous, cross-genre ventures in the Australian underground for many years. Bystrom has offered a rhythmic heart for Exhaustion and Leather Towel, whilst further expanding on metrical ideas in Compound, his solo electronic undertaking. Zond, TOL, Grane and various solo outings have all showcased Fuller’s severely manipulated, hallucinogenic guitar and unsettling electronics. O’Regan has provided lithe, turbulent and imaginative bass guitar for The Bunyip Moon, and antagonistic industrial electronics as Dire Ears. Groves, as vocalist, has previously oscillated between the idiosyncratic combination of drily delivered text, close-miked voice and concrète sound for Red Wine and Sugar and solo project Absurd Cosmos Late Nite, as well as functioning as frontperson for noise rock and heavy electronic acts True Radical Miracle and Dead Boomers.   In Voice Imitator, these four pursue mutual auditory fixations and eccentric individual inputs toward a distinctive and cohesive unit. Groves’ texts are the outcome of anxious and fatigued surveillance, emerging as bleak satire and quietly surreal flashes drawn from the mundane. Vacillating awkwardly between barely contained frustration and ironic detachment, this voice is ushered by a relentless ostinato pulse, washes of heavily effected guitar, subterranean electronic noise and a tense ambience of self-conscious nervousness. Recurring undercurrents of motorik rhythm, and motor city techno draw shared obsession together, providing an altogether new construction. Much like the allegory of a boiling frog, here tension slowly...