Over the course of Words Are Missing, Berlin-based artist and self-described e-poetess AGF (aka Antye Greie) seeks to create wonderfully complicated cut’n’paste computer-werks in which vocals are ever-present but where words never take on a coherent shape. She gives us versions of her voice that have been tested by wires and hard-drives and has come up with a work of jagged wonder.
Words Are Missing strafes along with stuttery beats, amped up and fed through shimmering slivers of gushing light, places where beats break up as soon as their created, mostly made of voice-box, that stutter and get split apart by echoes of themselves. Most of the compositions, when listened to deeper, are made of the same elements: while above rain the busted voice-drums, the undercurrent of which runs the hymn/hum of quiet keyboard or rasping of an iron sheet. ‘Cognitive Modules Party II’ a building thrum of voice-notes ‘ah’s and ‘em’s make up the beat while a heavy hovering beat breaks up synths of silver nitrate. ‘Presswehen’ has Greie in anguish, crying amidst a hail of roaring glitches. The works are devoutly feminine and have a smooth, sexy quality to them that betrays what, in anyone else’s hands, might be quite a violent music.
The release is a disc/photobook package and features artworks done in minimal whites and greys and blacks. All images take a little while to properly discern – long looks are necessary for proper enjoyment. Much like the music. With the missing words and the images somehow missing something, too, the listener is given to searching for their own poetry or picture inside the disjointed beats and drips of soft, ambient underlay.
Joel Hedrick
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