In Voices, Damaino David constructs a labyrinth of interiority, mapping the terrain of modern alienation through sonic dissonance, scattered memory, and lyrical dread. It is an album—if one dares to call it that—that refutes traditional structures and instead arranges itself like a disassembled prayer, full of fragmented grace and untraceable menace. Rather than offer harmony, Voices hums with friction—between body and spirit, chaos and silence, self and selves.

From its very first track, David rejects melodic comfort. There is no easing in. The opener, “Murmur Index,” is less a song than a haunted broadcast—a voice modulated through static, looping phrases like disembodied thoughts circling a sleepless mind. It serves as both invocation and warning: this will not be an easy listen. But it will be a necessary one.

Born out of the pandemic-era solitude but refusing to be tethered to it, Voices feels like a time capsule filled with things no one wanted to preserve—shadows of childhood trauma, digital detritus, late-night hallucinations, racialized fear, and the strange stillness of a global hush. Damaino David, who emerged from the borderless digital underground with mixtapes stitched from internet scraps and ambient phantasmagoria, has never been one for accessibility. But here, even more than before, his work demands a surrender to discomfort.

If the prevailing trend in contemporary experimental music has been one of maximal collage—fractured beats, pop culture detritus, and glitch noise—David’s Voices does something more intimate. It’s not the cityscape collapsing; it’s a voice cracking in a closet. It is isolation rendered in granular fidelity. The vocal layering throughout the project, at times pitch-shifted to unnatural heights or swallowed into reverb-heavy voids, becomes its own dissonant choir. These are not harmonies; they are confessions clashing mid-air.

Take the standout track “I Saw Myself Leaving.” What begins as a sparse ambient scape—faint piano chords, field recordings of rain, a whispered loop—suddenly erupts into a claustrophobic monologue where David, through at least three vocal registers, recounts an out-of-body experience triggered by grief. The autobiographical dissolves into the hallucinatory. The listener is unsure if the voice belongs to the narrator or to one of the many “selves” fractured across the tracklist. It’s here that David reveals Voices not just as a sonic document, but as a psychological excavation.

Identity, for David, is not stable—it is war-torn. The track “Blackout Syntax” furthers this thesis. Against a rhythm that never resolves, David’s voice stutters and collapses on itself, like a corrupted language file trying to reboot. Lyrically abstract but emotionally devastating, the song invokes the disorienting experience of trying to articulate Blackness, queerness, and trauma within frameworks that deny all three. It’s not a cry for clarity. It’s a refusal of translation.

Though unrelentingly dark, Voices never falls into nihilism. Instead, it offers moments of staggering fragility. On “Room with No Corners,” a rare acoustic guitar filters through the mix like a candle in a bomb shelter. David sings—plainly, almost sweetly—for the first time, and it lands like a reprieve. “I dreamt I had a name / No one else could say,” he intones. In that quiet moment, identity is not fragmented—it is sacred, private, and unsharable. The contrast with the album’s more cacophonous moments sharpens the emotional depth of these rare silences.

What also makes Voices an essential contribution to the landscape of post-genre experimentation is its refusal to cater to any one scene. It is too abstract for traditional hip-hop, too emotionally raw for ambient purists, too dissonant for indie pop, and too lyrical for noise music. This deliberate refusal of categorization is its own radical act. David is not performing multiplicity; he is living in it.

Production-wise, Voices is a marvel of lo-fi precision. Every texture feels found, borrowed, or decayed—there is no sheen, no polish. The beats, when they appear, feel like ghosts of rhythms once known, now disfigured. Samples drift in and out like radio interference. In this way, the album resembles a dream where sound is both omnipresent and unreliable. This lo-fi commitment is not aesthetic affectation—it’s conceptual. It mirrors the glitchy impermanence of digital memory and the unstable fidelity of inner thought.

The spoken interludes scattered across the project are particularly arresting. They are presented as voicemails, diary entries, therapy transcripts—some real, some fiction. On “Data of the Soul,” a voicemail plays where an unnamed voice (perhaps David’s, perhaps not) admits: “I don’t know which part of me is speaking anymore.” That uncertainty, rather than being tragic, becomes poetic. Voices suggests that in the dissolution of the self, new configurations can emerge.

In interviews, Damaino David has spoken little about the making of Voices. But that silence feels deliberate. The album resists explanation. It functions less as a statement and more as an atmosphere—an anti-narrative. Its power lies in the fact that it demands interpretation yet defies consensus. Each listen offers a different mood, a different emotional temperature. That mutability makes it endlessly re-playable and psychically intrusive.

If we must locate Voices in a lineage, it would sit somewhere between the haunted introspections of Tricky’s Maxinquaye, the audio diaries of Dean Blunt, the linguistic deconstructions of Moor Mother, and the abstract collage of Yves Tumor’s early work. But it is not derivative of any of them. It feels like the opposite of homage. Rather, it echoes an archive of private frequencies—tuned to pain, desire, displacement, and longing.

In the end, Voices is not just a listening experience. It’s a reckoning. With its refusal of form, its clashing internal textures, and its brutal vulnerability, Damaino David has offered something that feels closer to a mirror than an album. And for those who dare to look—really look—it might just reflect something unspoken within.

 

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