This collaborative work by Ohio-based High aura'd and Florida-bound Josh Mason is a tribute to youthful obsessions and glorious decay.
"Lower Yr Voice" captures all of the static electricity and gorgeous distortion ping-ponging between solid state amps and busted eardrums that filled sweaty basements and VFW halls in the split-seconds between songs performed by bands like Portraits of Past and Clikatat Ikatowi. This record, by two artists with their feet planted in the firma of eliding ambient/drone music, finds the two interpolating the unintended sweetness and experimentation in those between-song pregnant pauses of bands flying the banner of Ebullition and Gravity Records.
In doing so, this album is much an homage to a short-lived scene as it is an uncovering of hidden beauty in the youthful overabundance of energy, anxiety, wonder and pain. The slow decay comes sooner than we think, but there is beauty, even in that.
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"Quiet drones strung from grey clouds and doomy, feedback-smoked ash swirl together on a collaborative album that both illuminates and obscures the differing, yet complementary ambient styles of Josh Mason and John Kolodij (a.k.a. High Aura'd). - NPR Music, Lars Gotrich
"The sound is enwombing and partially frail, like a dessert handkerchief unknown on the dining table the night before. “Silver”, for example, the lead track in the promotional material, dates itself in tremors of white noise, an amoeba in a busy queue of bacteria. A full and absorbing adventure, it’s a cut that deserves your full attention upon its crest." - Fluid Radio
"the sounds and images that unfold in the video for “Silver” were crafted simultaneously, along a walk through the woods, crouching along a stream, watching nothing and everything." - Tiny Mix Tapes
"Lower Yr Voice is the fruit of a collaboration between the two musicians and equals a statement as to what an ambient album is. There is always a steady current of sonic soil, out of which all the elements, large or small, flourish. Quite a few references are apparent, but homogenized into both High Aura’d and Josh Mason collective style. Guitar and electronics have a major role, a brew of infused electric overload that soaks everything." - Toneshift
"Built upon foundations of feedback and the potential of negative space to communicate, Lower Yr Voice is a tribute to the beauty that can only come from knowing that each moment will pass, and so each opportunity must be treasured. As such, it is a meditative album, for late-night contemplation and correspondence; the soundtrack to writing midnight letters to friends you fear it’s been too long since you spoke and as such you’ve lost contact with them; but who themselves hold exactly the same worry, with each of you just waiting for the other to reach out. Lower Yr Voice, as minimalist as it is, is the sound of the joy of connection." - The Sound Not the Word