Chorus was a record by the post-shoegazing duo Lovesliescrushing that was released via an obscure Peruvian imprint called Automatic Entertainment sometime in 2007. Needless to say, it's an album that practically nobody has heard, barring a download from a blog or something. Despite the novelty of this incredibly rare record, Chorus was also a major departure for the duo in that voice was the only source material for all of the blissed out driftscapes, with Scott Cortez eschewing the fizzed, opiated, and blurred guitar in favor of effects-heavy treatments upon the wordless vocals of Mellisa Arpin-Duimstra. Crwth is a re-edit of the raw material used for Chorus, emerging with a very similar muted hue of softed loops and delicate drones that hang gently upon the backdrop of digital dust blown upon a velvet surface. For those of you who had gotten a hold of the limited 2cd boxset on Projekt (or had been familiar with the last couple of Lovesliescrushing albums for that matter), this sole use of voice isn't all that much of a stretch, as Lovesliescrushing has been pushing a trajectory away from the beautiful noises of their MBV-inspired Bloweyelashwish and toward an angelic, slightly melancholy ambience with only the flicker of a song structure hovering at the bottom of their echo chamber. It's been said that Lovesliescrushing finds themselves between Slowdive and Fennesz; yes, that's true, but the reductionism down to an essential beautiful sound is taken even further than that imagined hybrid. Really, this is quite fantastic.

Richard Chartier's 12k offshoot, Line, brings this early nineties dream-pop band to a whole new audience with a revisitation of their 2007 album, Chorus. The Arizona-based group revolve around a core duo of Scott Cortez (guitars and loops) and Melissa Arpin-Duimstra (vocals), in their early days exhibiting a sound that relied heavily on the effects-loaded soundscapes of Cortez - whose work might be seen as an American counterpart to that of Kevin Shields. For Chorus the duo abandoned guitars altogether and set about constructing ambient pieces from Arpin-Duimstra's vocals, processing the recordings via computer and in so doing creating ambient soundscapes. Crwth was commissioned especially for Line after Cortez and Chartier struck up a dialogue, and as is in-keeping with the label's profile, Lovesliescrushing (seriously, how shoegaze can one band's name get?) revisited the original Chorus material with the aim of drawing it even deeper into the realms of abstraction. The end results are uniformly beautiful, at times completely dissolving the voice into a pool of warm tonality, while at others preserving its integrity and draping it in acres of reverb and layered harmonies. What could have been a fairly wispy and slight sonic palette transpires to be anything but: Cortez and Arpin -Duimstra construct detailed, surreal pop music on Crwth, filled with deep sub-bass swells and glistening, breathy vapours. The end product is given a final mastering touch by Taylor Deupree, leaving you with one of Line's most approachable and unashamedly ear-pleasing releases to date. Lovely.

While perhaps known better for their lush, hazy guitar abstractions, the duo of Melissa Arpin-Duimstra and Scott Cortez are not afraid to push their sound even further into the reaches of the sonic galaxy, as this new reconstruction proves. Originally issued on a tiny Peruvian label in 2007, Chorus was a conscious attempt to remove guitars and instrumentation, and simply work with the sound of Arpin-Duimstra’s voice. For its reissue, the entire album is reworked yet again, using the tiniest of vocal fragments to weave a beautiful atmospheric tapestry of sound.

As expected from its development, the sound of Crwth is one that is more treated and distilled than its Chorus predecessor which, thankfully, is included as a free download, along with three additional reworked tracks that wouldn’t fit on the disc. The original material is closer in spirit to the band’s earlier work, though still full of cut and paste phonemes and what must be vocal snippets run through guitar effects pedals. While sounding very unlike their peers, there are still significant traces of a sound influenced by the likes of MBV, just with even less consideration for the conventional structures of pop music.

The new material allows Melissa’s natural voice to shine through at times, but the greater focus is on dismantling the syllables and breaths she provides into a variety of sounds, some which mimic traditional instruments, others which have no discernable origin. The opening "Dzai" leaves her gentle vocals out in the open, with little in the way of processing other than layering, which later surges into a sustained tone, with small phonemes morphing into a rhythmic click while others are processed into cello like low register swells of sound. "Vrhhu" allows the beautiful vocals to appear untreated, resembling a gentle, wordless lullaby as other bits of her voice are done up to sound like strings, providing a soft, gauzy bed for her angelic voice to rest upon. "Rhvr" also chooses to showcase the voice, with only the most subtle of reverberation and processed sonic punctuation to flesh out the sound.

In other cases, the voice is used simply as a starting point, and the outcome resembles something else entirely: "Glnkq" sounds much more like a complex synthesizer or laptop based composition, with its looped low frequency rhythmic pulse and shimmering pseudo-horn passages, and the cold minimalism of "Qlinglo," which channels distant strings and indefinable bassy frequencies. Even with little resemblance to its source material, few things other than the human voice can be capable of rendering such loneliness and despair that is captured on "Shemerr." While the palette that the sound is drawn from isn’t clear, the heavy emotions it conveys are rarely captured by anything other than the human voice.

When I first saw this listed on the upcoming release list from Line, I was a bit shocked. I knew the name sounded familiar, and a quick bit of research confirmed my instinct that Lovesliescrushing was a band associated more with the 1990s ethereal pop/gothic movement than anything else. Hell, they had releases on the Projekt label, definitely not something I would have seen as fitting in with this label’s preference for clinical and installation based compositions. However, the material here does fit in with the Line ethos, it just happens to have more of an organic core than many, such as myself, were expecting. The final product is a simply beautiful set of pieces that is consistent with the explorations in sound motive of electronic artists, but with a natural beauty and grace that few are able to mimic with their laptops and complex software. -Creaig Dunton

4 OF 5 STARS | The notion that voice alone is enough to carry music is by no means a new one. The almost ominous hums of Gregorian chants and Anaasheed have already haunted our ears for centuries, yet the a capella approach has, in more recent years, also been adopted by a plethora of other artists working in a variety of genres.

Barbershop is a well-known, though hopelessly kitsch and minimally enjoyable, example, but the art has also been adopted into genres like hip hop, where rappers may be supported by beat boxers alone, and pop (Björk’s 2004 album Medúlla, consisting nearly entirely of voice samples, is a prime example). In avant-garde, the approach is neither new, yet there especially the possibilities are manifold, since the end result need not sound, by any traditional sense of the word, musical. At one end of the spectrum we find a compilation such as Mouth Noise, released through XV Parówek’s label XVP in 2008, for which artists used the mouth alone to construct deafening noise bursts. At the other end, we find Lovesliescrushing’s CRWTH (Chorus Redux).

Back in 2007 Lovesliescrushing, an ambient/shoegaze outfit hailing from Tucson, Arizona, released their album Chorus through Peruvian label Automatic Entertainment. Chorus , as the name already seems to imply somewhat, was constructed entirely of voice samples, which Scott Cortez – also of the decidedly noisier shoegaze outfit Astrobrite – spliced at the phoneme level, after which the phonemes were reworked, treated, looped, layered to create entirely new compositions in which the voice became a stream of sound your ears couldn’t decipher as speech, or in which you couldn’t even recognize specific phonemes, a stream of unrecognizable, ethereal vowels framed and portioned by as unrecognizable consonantal clicks.

CRWTH (Chorus Redux) is a reworking of the criminally limited Chorus (which was released in an edition of 500, as is CRWTH, by the way), and the goal of the reworking was, as per the (spot-on, I have to say) liner notes, “to abstract even further upon an abstraction”. And indeed, Cortez, deconstructing and reconstructing meticulously voice samples from band mate Melissa Aprin-Duimstra and himself, seems to have succeeded at that very well – and, in the process, has created a redux album that easily outshines the original. Whoever is familiar with the original Chorus knows that that album was filled to the brim with layers of voice piled upon another to create a particularly shoegazy type of ambient, certainly beautiful but also confrontational, in a sense – ambient crashing into you with full force, sooner bringing to mind the ethereally noisy aesthetics of My Bloody Valentine than the soft-spoken dreaminess of Loscil.

CRWTH is a decidedly more soft-spoken album, though; silent, calm, precious. The walls of voice as they were found on Chorus are a thing of the past, and instead we find hushed compositions, sometimes bordering on the inaudible, pushing slowly forward and working toward no particular climax, instead staying subdued and intangible. It seems to betray some influence of Richard Chartier, who commissioned CRWTH; Chartier’s works, of course, are probably the prime example of ambient music’s effective use of silence. That hushed quality, exactly, is what makes CRWTH so beautiful – whereas its mother album was something to enjoy, this is something to love. Whereas Chorus was an album that was superficially pretty, CRWTH is one that is haunting and engulfing in every single way. Not entirely surprisingly, the tracks now and then bear some resemblance to Gregorian chants. To tracks like DZAI and FLRM, there’s an almost religious feel, a sense that whatever is communicated through the reconstructed fragments of voice is something superhuman,  sounding of age, wisdom and divine beauty.

CRWTH (Chorus Redux) is singularly amazing, with the new material surpassing the original material in every which way. Seeing as Chorus, however, was already excellent, it should tell you something about how astonishing this album is. A truly, highly recommended album, which furthermore comes with a free download link to Chorus, for us listeners to contrast, compare, adore. Another excellent release on Line, a division of Taylor Deupree’s brilliant 12k label, that should simply not be missed. - Sven Klippel

I've not heard of these folks before. They formed in 1991 and released this album Chorus which was only released in Peru. Apparently Richard Chartier was well into it and he was pretty keen to get his hands on a copy and eventually after a number of conversations with Lovesliescrushing he persuaded them to go back to the original album and re do it. So it's not a remix album... it's a redux. Am I right in thinking the word redux has only been used in the last few years? I'm sure I never heard the word before the Pavement Slanted & Enchanted Redux album.... There's people out there making up words for you to inadvertently use tomorrow without realising.... Anyway the music on here is well lush.... The original album was only made using vocals... the redux version also just uses vocals. You'll listen to it and wonder how they did it as it's possibly one of the most remarkable things I've heard being that it just consists of manipulated voices and processing. It really does sit in somewhere between Seefeel and Fennesz... that's totally spot on... beautiful drifting melodies with some delicate fuzz and occasional heavenly female vocals make it all seem almost spiritual and ethereal. It's just incredible it's all been made with the human voice! Not just that but they've managed to create something as good as this with minimal resources! It's like a lost album which Infraction should have released! Also includes a download code to get the original album a 3 bonus tracks. A steal! -Phil

A recording by a pioneering shoegaze outfit isn't the first thing that comes to mind when pondering Line's discography. But Lovesliescrushing is no ordinary shoegaze band and Crwth (Chorus Redux) is no ordinary shoegaze collection. First of all, though the group, founded in 1991 by Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin-Duimstra, does blend elements of shoegaze, post-rock, ambient soundscaping, and experimental music into a heady, low-tech mix, it does so by limiting the focus to guitar and voice and omitting drums, bass, and keyboards from its songs. In doing so, the group distances itself from shoegaze standbearers such as Ride and Slowdive who built their respective walls of sound using conventional ‘rock' instrumentation and song forms. What distances Crwth (Chorus Redux) even more from other genre albums of its kind is that all twelve of the recording's tracks feature voice only, with Cortez's guitar playing removed in its entirety.

A bit of background is needed first, however. As the title indicates, Crwth (Chorus Redux) was preceded by the Lovesliescrushing release Chorus, which also, like its successor, features vocals only. On that 2007 recording, the group manipulates vocal tracks and uses processing to transform them into lush settings of floating character. As the limited edition release was issued only in Peru and therefore difficult to find, Line head Richard Chartier contacted Cortez in order to obtain a copy of the recording, which eventually led to the idea of Lovesliescrushing revisiting the album's tracks for a Line recording, the idea being that Crwth would become an even further abstraction upon the original material. The results are ethereal, naturally, but also strikingly beautiful, to say the least. In some tracks, angelic voices intone softly to produce celestial moods; in other cases, the voices are processed so radically they become little more than minimal tones that throb and drone as relaxedly as a sleeping baby. “RHVR” offers a particular lovely example of the album's style when its voices circle around one another, and when lone voices separate themselves out of the mass and then blend back into it. Murmuring ambient settings like “SHEMERR” and “FLRM,” on the other hand, billow as entrancingly as clouds moving almost imperceptibly across the summer sky. Many of the pieces whisper so peacefully, they're like the deepest sleep state given aural form. Crwth (Chorus Redux) amounts to seventy minutes of minimal vocal-based landscapes where the voices of Arpin-Duimstra and Cortez, altered by fx processing, drift beatifically.