3 out of 5

Produced by: Jeremy Simmonds

Label: Rephlex

Exactly what’s advertised.  Is that a good thing or bad thing?  …I guess it depends on your expectations.  Voafose is Jeremy Simmonds, who I know from his work with Wagon Christ guy Luke Vibert, but who also has quite a rep in indie electronica as a remixer, or general name-checkable dude.  We’re familiar with such figures: those who constantly pop-up as guests or in thank-yous, frequently the highlight of a track or album, and leaving us wondering when they’re going to work on their own project.  For Simmonds, that resulted – sort of, eventually – in a solo Voafose disc, which is a collection of snippets from the past 20 or so years.  “Hey,” you think, because you generally preface your thoughts in such a fashion, “I’ve dug demos and such from dudes like Richard D. James – I’m sure Simmonds has a similarly deep well of cool concepts to offer.”  And if those were your expectations – similar to mine – then prepare to be underwhelmed.  Indeed, ‘Voafose’ is snippets, but on the whole, these are the most snippety of snippets: about half the tracks are very minimalist tone explorations, with the remaining tracks very basically manipulated samples, and then a scant few things that could be heard as songs.  The explorations are not uninteresting, but they are incredibly aimless; they are far from registering as ambient tracks, and instead come across as something between that and drone, when Simmonds isn’t just playing around with a tone or effect.  Very rarely, you’ll get a minute or two of an actual song, though –  take late-in-the-album ‘Wooden League’ – and it keeps you sticking around hoping for more (though ironically that track was pre-released on its own…).  That ‘more’ often ends up being, like, vocal manipulations, but at the very least, even those tracks are in sync with the scattered, minimalist set of sounds here.

Voafose, if understood to be the spatter of years-spanning randomness it is, is not without value, and at times can be moodily compelling.  But I think we’re all forgiven for hoping / assuming there’d be something a bit more to hear.