Roger Reynolds - Voicespace (1982)

A reissue of the two-record set, featuring four pieces for computer electronics and voices that amplify to an extreme degree the components and expressive qualities of the voice. "Still," with a text from Samuel Coleridge's The Wanderings of Cain (1798), moves extremely slowly in a "vocal fry" across the aspirate clicks and wind of the performer; "A Merciful Coincidence," on a text from Samuel Beckett's Watt (1953), uses the aggressive-passive inflections of the frog performers croaking, which seems to have intent, if not syntactical "meaning"; "Eclipse," with a combined text from Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Marquez, Issa, James Joyce, Melville, and Wallace Stevens, eclipses strains of modulated texts into each other; and "The Palace," on a translated text by Borges (1976), is a dramatic monodrama about how The Self imagines its confines within the space of The Mind, with the prerecorded modified voice added to the singer onstage, yielding an enormous, suprahuman quality.