Primarily a digital artist, Huddersfield-based Charlotte Roe’s Words Out Of Words release is an oblique and entertaining portion of musical abstraction. Based on the artist’s coding / generative portfolio, and experimental works found online, it’s likely that there’s a pretty fascinating ‘how’ story about how the tracks here came to be created. While it’d be interesting to find out whether it’s the result of a complicated process of code-guided improvisation, the music stands without the backstory.
Consisting of three short tracks sounding like they were made with the same setup/gear, Roe has worked with a trim palette of oddly inflected rhythms, askew jazzy keys, and randomly snipped, chopped, and indiscernible vocals. The music on “Ten Foot of the Rare Foot” sounds like a beat from the less sample-heavy second era of RZA’s productions, a handful of spooky notes over a bare snap and clap rhythm. The voices are chopped into a jagged radio interference jumble and sent off into the echo-like skipping stones. There’s a sense that the words are the core of Words Out Of Words but also that they are the most arbitrarily placed elements; an upfront accident.
Stumbling into play on an accidental rhythm, an abstract funk somewhere between Prince and Tricky, opener “[Redacted]”s partial melody of loping keys leaves as many gaps as the synthesized voices. On this track it’s possible to hear a snatch of a coherent phrase, on the other two it’s more of a blur of overrunning syllables and clipped words. The more actual words are heard, the more the ear tries to latch onto them for meaning, fostering a curious intimacy that Roe leaves unfulfilled.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon.
