Stories without words

So here’s my second post of slightly difficult music – sounds that come from, well, fairly close to the edge, the bright orange perimeter fencing, shall we say…

Voices and Organs

In my mind I’ve bracketed Voices and Organs along with Locks mostly for dumb, lazy reasons – they sit next to each other on my media player, for example, they’re both IODA discoveries and both turn out to be on Emusic. Oh, and they’re both weird (that’ll be the other one).

To be honest, though, they don’t really sound much like each other at all; whereas Locks are all broken beats and unexpected choices; V&O are about uneasy acoustics and gothic impressions, more like an American Cocorosie, without the mad women in the attic.

The Western Vinyl site says this about their record, Orphanage:

“Voices and Organs is a musical project which started in the Autumn of 2004 as a collection of short stories... these stories turned into songs and songs turned into a record soon to be released on Western Vinyl as Orphanage. Rooted in the group's love of fiction, the record deals with childhood/adolescent isolation through a series of short stories about a young boy and girl in an orphanage.”

The comment about short stories I find interesting, not least because there aren’t really many voices on the record, and the ones there are are used for harmonies, or are buried way, way down in the mix. If this is fiction, it’s fiction without, well, any words.

I don’t really mind, though, and in my head I can square this by imagining stories being read over the top of these backdrops of sound. Stories that don’t end well, I’d say…

Voices and Organs are principally the work of a feller called Per Lindmark, and are based in Sweden. According to their Myspace page, there is another record on the way, which “will be beautiful”. Well, I reckon Orphanage has a certain fragile beauty to it, to be honest, so the new one sounds like it’ll be worth a listen as well.

There are three tracks from Orphanage made available for you by the people of IODA, all of them worth hearing…

Any Day Now (mp3)

Melodika (mp3)

Idle Words #2 (mp3)

Buy at eMusic

Voices and Organs