Mark Beasley "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence: The Voice in Mike Kelley’s Music"

Mark Beasley

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence: The Voice in Mike Kelley’s Music

This is such a great article, it is AVC through and through (or at least I feel it is).... 

Check out killer text like: 

"In DAM’s 2009 triple album reissue Niagara—a sickly anti-blonde Marilyn Monroe with riveting anti-stage presence all cheap peroxide hair and ashen skin—begins her Vampirechant, a declaration of self as folkloric bloodsucker. The lyrics are delivered in faltering style; crawling from the cave of the mouth festering on the tongue this is Karen Carpenter as the living dead hopped up on Valium and Nyquil. The voice is not feminine sweet or controlled, it stands as one of the punk precursors for a generation to come (Ari Up, Siouxsie Sioux). Of these early recordings it is clear that Niagara is the presiding and authored voice, revealed as person as personality: the “I” of the song. To this extent pop rules are exemplified, the “special” and authored voice is adhered to, as listeners we search for the life in someone’s voice that beyond lyrics the material—the tenor of the voice—reveals the person and the body inherent. As the writer Simon Frith has it “the first general point to make about the pop voice, then, is that we hear singers as personally expressive, in a way that a classical singer is not.” The voice in classical music is on par with the instrument it sits within the score and assumes the role of bass, baritone, tenor or soprano. The pop voice fends its way scoreless, feeling, and in this instance crawling it’s way amongst discordant and broken sound."

Hope you enjoy.

Big thanks to Open File's Tim Dixon for sharing.