The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 27

AGF
Words Are Missing

The fourth release under the AGF name from Antye Greie doesn't stray too far from the model she's set out for herself with the previous work--It's weird! Most people won't like it! Old folks will say it's not music! It's pretty long! On top of that, the album also comes with a good old fashioned language experiment, making it the long dead Ludwig Wittgenstein's favorite album. So yeah, it's not for everybody. But unlike some of the more dreary work that her husband Vladislav Delay occasionally releases under the Uusitalo moniker, Words Are Missing is, resoundingly, for somebody. A throughly imagined trip through her standard harmonic beat and tripped out dub concoctions, the album pops and farts it's way through 16 tracks, all of which experiment with a bizarre--yet wholly intricate--form of vocals, wherein Greie merely mixes in various pronouncements of vowels and sounds. It's not "singing," not at all--it's clear that all of the vocals are being manipulated into the songs the same way that Bjork did a few years ago with Medulla, when she used only the human voice and it's various sounds for production. That album, a failed and inherently flawed experiment brought low both by the basic inability of the human voice to cover the entire range of possible sound and the various irritations that anyone experiences when they have to hear yet another human beatboxer pretend to scratch while white chicks sing, couldn't be more far removed from the experience of Words Are Missing--but the intent to explore what the voice allows, what sound itself allows, was similar, despite both taking severely different tactics. Whereas Bjork chose to create the entire sequence and then force meaning into it by defining the rules with lyrics, Greie's mode of delivery allows for nearly any possible explanation of purpose or plot. (Although it's unlikely that songs like "Kz" are about falling in love, as it's clearly got a whole "watch out for the fascists" boom in the background.) See, what Greie does is she only allows the merest semblance of a consonant or vowel sound to escape her lips, thereafter taking the recordings and dropping them in as the counterpoint to the pointed harshness of what is, at it's core, an exaggerated form of dubstep by way of German minimalism. It's not that Greie is a lost cousin of Benga and the current scene, but that dubstep--through it's own obsessions with finding the harmony of sound while remaining mostly dependent on entirely digitized constructions--has found it's way to what Greie was doing all along. The difference will always be that...well, besides dubstep having the same sexist problems as grime and gangster when it comes to embracing female practitioners, albeit a problem that's neither as bad or widespread--but mainly that Antye seems wholly uninterested in reaching any form of popular audience. In other words, you can't dance to this, you'll have a hard time sharing it, and it's a bitch to explain--but you can be frightened by it, which you certainly will be if you make it to "Presswehen," a brief song that is so extravagantly doom-laden that it ends up sounding more like an actual murder is taking place inside your home than it does a soundtrack to a film depicting as such; or you can find yourself obsessing over the album in it's totality, inserting your own form of meaning into the strangled, digital bursts of sound. No matter what your experience, if you're in the right mood, you probably will end up being fascinated by it. Antye has been asking these questions--what do words mean, what happens if we just don't agree on the meaning, what exists when something is inherently only an agreed upon product of sound--but it was this year when she finally figured out the best way to share that study with the rest of us. Outside of AGF's music output, her main passion is one for poetry--Words Are Missing is just her way of providing you the blank script to write your own.

-Tucker Stone, 2008