This month's article speaks directly to the text you read last month, in an attempt to widen the perspective, starting from an adjacent but distinct territory. Not the voice that abandons language, but the voice that holds it back without handing it over. Here, the inquiry is into a map of living practices, investigated through those who inhabit them. The result is an open taxonomy, built also from the voices of those who make these choices every day, in contexts and with tools very different from one another. The text was produced also thanks to an interview form addressed to musicians who work with the voice.
If the unintelligible voice discussed by a certain twentieth-century tradition arises from the abandonment of language, there exists an adjacent territory in which language is not abandoned and yet does not arrive. It is this second condition that interests us here. To approach this territory we opened a form to those who inhabit these practices, asking how they experience the relationship between word and incomprehension. This text also stems from those answers.
There are singing practices tied to the word and to language that present structured and comprehensible lyrics, but that pass through a matrix of opacity in being delivered to the listener. I like to imagine it almost as a visual parameter, the opacity applied to an image during editing: a value that, the lower it goes, the more it makes the content itself intelligible, while keeping the same content, the same image, at its base.
This opacity filter can be applied to the word at various moments in the making of the final sound: directly from the mouth, in the effects chain, or in the very mixing of the sounds that accompany it.
This incomprehension can arise along several paths, which I have tried to sum up roughly in four groups.
COLLAPSE → rupture of the phonic form of language. The loss of structure, the extreme scream: language falls into the sonic matter. This approach may be most recognizable in certain extreme genres such as black metal and brutal metal.
OCCULTATION → presence of an imperceptible language. Layering, whispering, reverb: language does not rise above the sonic matter that accompanies it. This approach may be most recognizable in certain genres such as ambient, shoegaze or dream pop.
DEFORMATION → language that is unstable or deformed in its emission. Extreme speed, pitch shifting, disarticulation: language is recognizable but continually altered, unstable or hard to access. This approach may be most recognizable in certain musical genres such as the most extreme fringes of trap or ragga, or in hyperpop.
All of these represent a process of opacification of language through the very vocalization of language. I would also like to add a separate category, which takes a different path from the start and thus cannot fall under those already mentioned. A category that operates upstream, presenting the listener with a linguistic system that is already external or non-referential.
ALTERITY → production of non-referential language. Dead languages, invented languages, codes: here a language already other to the listener is staged, where the prose remains only in the head of the one who writes or of the one who holds the key to the code. The manifestation of alterity does not coincide perfectly with the use of the voice as an instrument, although the voice is nonetheless part of the composition itself: the choice of certain words, especially invented ones, often falls on phonemes that lend themselves to a sonic intent.
This opacity spreads over language that nonetheless remains present, active in the mouth of the one who sings, creeping into the ears of the one who listens: an incomplete communicative presence. But this is not an accident; it is a suspended space in which these practices express themselves fully. Incomprehension creates differentiated levels of access. Deprived of verbal decoding, the listener does not give in to the dismay of not understanding: they shift, poised between curiosity and acceptance. Attention becomes more physical, less interpretive. Vocal opacity is not a deprivation but a redistribution: it shifts the weight from verbal information to the sonic event, from meaning to vibrating matter.
The distinction among the four categories is not merely taxonomic: it corresponds to four different mechanisms of redistribution. Collapse, occultation, deformation, alterity are not modes in which language fails; they are modes in which it is redirected. In collapse the voice overwhelms the text in a violent and irreversible way, and the meaning remains foreclosed, along with the customary lyrics booklet. In occultation the text survives somewhere in the mix, hidden under layers of sound, and this latent survival creates a different tension: at times one senses that something is there, at others the blurring of edges turns into drones or completely unintelligible sounds. In deformation the text is recognizable but unstable, it surfaces and vanishes, and this oscillation produces a poised, suspended listening, potentially even irritating, aggressive. In alterity, finally, the text is already elsewhere before it is even pronounced, the code itself is not shared, and this distance is constitutive.
In all these cases the text is treated as sonic material: the word is no longer the voice's point of arrival but one of its parameters, alongside pitch, timbre, duration, dynamics. Not as a unit of meaning but as a unit of sound. The choice of a word does not depend only on what it means but on how it sounds, on where it falls in the breath, on how it articulates in its encounter with the other parameters. Meaning does not disappear but remains as a latent layer, as semantic pressure; it no longer governs the composition alone. This operation has a precise genealogy in the music of the second half of the twentieth century, in which the vocal text is systematically subjected to fragmentation, superimposition, spatial and timbral dissemination: the text is present, but is not delivered, it is traversed. Contemporary opacifying practices graft themselves onto this tradition, often without knowing it or declaring it: when a producer processes the voice until it is unrecognizable, or when a singer disarticulates the text into a scream, they are deciding that the text serves the composition, not the other way around. The difference lies in the cultural context, the theoretical awareness, the degree of elaboration. The underlying logic is the same.
Opacifying practices often care about the verbal content, the so-called text. But the compositional method of the works produced passes through a strong mechanism of evaluating the sonic rendering.
“The sonic rendering of the voice brings out a latent verbal content. It is a much more primitive mechanism than language: undertaking an emotional movement, a communication, through the internal and then external resonance of one's own voice. From there the verbal content is triggered.” — Matto Zoppi
It can happen that interest in the sonic rendering compromises interest in the text, without however giving up on conveying a content, perhaps a more purely emotional one. Sonic expression reflects both an emotionality of the content, however opacified it may be, and that of the vocal practice employed. An example that might seem a cliché is the use of a scream, which often conveys an emotion of rage or despair. Or the paradox of certain uses of the growl, perhaps in contexts closer to the grindcore scene, which at times, even when presenting ironic or silly lyrics, on a distracted listen can be traced back to moments that are not only grotesque but also brutal or violent.
“Are there moments in life when the very power of the voice surpasses the meaning of words? They are rare, but sometimes a wordless scream into the void can mean more than whispered words.” - Parker Black, Prison Religion
Vocal opacity is not evaluated as a shortfall with respect to a norm of clarity. It is evaluated for what it builds: a relationship with the listener in which meaning is not given but suspended. The text is still there, in the mouth of the one who sings, in the structure of the composition, in the head of the one who writes, but its function is no longer referential; it becomes matter. And that retention is not a gesture of exclusion: it is the very condition in which sound can once again become irreducible to what it says. Language carries with it the promise of meaning. When that promise is partially kept, or kept and then withdrawn, or formulated in a code one does not possess, a space opens up that transparent language cannot open.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →