Various – ‘Electric Dead Speak – Music for Electric Voice Phenomenon’ – Eighth Tower Records
When I was little, I remember very clearly that my sister, Tracy, had a flexi-disc featuring not hits of the moment but the voices of dead people. How could she have possibly come upon such an item? She wasn’t much one for magazines, though it was hardly the kind of thing that’d have come with ‘Look-In’. Neither was it likely to have been the free gift in a box of cornflakes, though this feels like a massive oversight on the part of cereal manufacturers. Maybe she’d borrowed it from someone at school. Maybe she’d sent away for it, naturally allowing 28 days for delivery and sending off a cheque to who knows where.
Why she owned it is less of a mystery. As a household, we loved horror movies, ghost stories and messing about with Ouija boards. Tracy and my mum certainly believed in ghosts, or at least had very open minds on the subject. My dad definitely didn’t – he barely believed in the living a lot of the time.
I only ever heard bits of it. It was definitely creepy. I don’t think that in my young mind, I particularly doubted that it was indeed the voices of dead people I could hear. The overriding feeling was one of frustration – why couldn’t they speak more clearly? There was a lot of muffled gabbling, but not much in the way of great insight, nor indeed any real discernible words. Why was the phone line they were connected to so poor? Heaven couldn’t be that great with so much interference. Where is the flexi-disc now? IT IS A MYSTERY*
Difficult to believe there hasn’t been an ambient compilation based on the phenomenon, but here we are, another release from the incredibly prolific Eighth Tower Records. ‘Electric Dead Speak’ doesn’t just nod to EVP, it behaves like it. Listening to it, that same confused, fuzzy method of contact runs through every track. There’s something almost charmingly luddite about the whole premise – as if electricity, of all things, would be the medium the dead choose to squeeze themselves through. Why not bathwater? Why not the family dog? Why must the afterlife rely on the same unreliable circuitry as a 1980s doorbell? What business has a phantom from the Middle Ages with electrickery?
Each artist seems to have their own theory. Some lean into the classic Raudive gabble, those half‑formed syllables that sound like someone trying to speak through a coat pocket. Others go for outright terror, throwing in screams and long, mournful howls, as if the dead have finally found a way to shout but not to articulate. A few pieces sit in that tense middle ground – the sense that something out there is pacing the perimeter of the signal, desperate to reach us but unable to find the right frequency. And then there are the tracks that capture the most familiar EVP sensation of all: that tiny, maddening flicker of almost‑meaning, the “ooh, I nearly caught that” frustration that keeps believers hooked and sceptics curious.
Taken as a whole, the compilation feels like a tour through the electromagnetic unconscious. Some artists treat EVP as a texture, some as a metaphor, some as a malfunction. The best contributions understand that EVP isn’t about revelation; it’s about interference. It’s about the human desire to hear something – anything – in the static. I want to believe; I HAVE to believe – it can’t just be real life we’re saddled with, surely?
Eighth Tower’s curation leans into that ambiguity rather than trying to resolve it. You’re never given a clean message. You’re given the possibility of one, which is far more interesting. Imagine if they were just rattling on about putting their shrouds out to dry.
Listening to ‘Electric Dead Speak’, I kept thinking about that old flexi‑disc. How I strained to hear meaning in the murk. How the dead, if they were speaking at all, seemed to be doing so through a sock. I know they’re dead, but it really does speak of putting in very little effort. Even the fact that it was on a flexi-disc, that most ineffective and fragile of all audio media, almost demanded you strain your ears before you even put it on. This compilation captures that same sensation – the thrill of almost understanding, the disappointment of not quite, and the strange comfort of knowing that if the dead really are trying to reach us, they’re just as bad at technology as the living.
* Probably the bin
Daz Lawrence