| Artist: Jim Cole & Spectral Voices Album: Sky Label: Spectral Spiral | 
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One of the innumerable attributes of the spacemusic genre would be the diverse methods employed by its great many practicioners. Jim Cole and the Spectral Voices are exploring music and the resulting experiences brought forth through their use of the most primeval instrument, the human voice and its range of sound.
After many years of devotion to this art, Cole and Spectral Voices have become masters of ethereal singing. Their craft is multi-faceted, involving the disciplines of overtone singing (producing and controlling more than one note simultaneously per singer) breathing and perfect pitch. The group gathers together in a very reverberant space, a now empty 120 foot water tower. They bring with them only a convoluted outline of how each piece will evolve, what emotions will be evoked and their talent and intuition as artists. What begins as something like a group meditation soon becomes a moving ceremony as the yield of the ensemble's voices produces a sound extreme in both beauty and emotional character. Their album Sky is the true record of a harmonic singing session from 1994. Sky will have the listener returning many times, attempting to both re-enter the zone this music puts one in and quantify an immeasurable factor that borders on the mystical. - Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 14 September 2000 | |