Voices

Voices is an ecclectic psychedelic improvisation free-form art/music/performance project sprouting out of Berkeley/Oakland, CA consisting of the collaborative efforts of Travis Wyche and Alejandro Magana. What started out as a couple of friends getting together to elevate minds and disseminate sounds in a moldy Oakland basement quickly evolved into a solidified ritual for melding complementary abstract ideals through sound. The band uses a wide variety of instrumentation, early on consisting of simple layering of guitars, bass, and piano, and then gradually expanding to include a drumset split between the musicians, homemade oscillators and sequencers, homemade microphones and amplification systems, stringed instruments such as dulcimers, kotos, and modified autoharps, lo-tech recording devices from 2bit samplers too reel-to-reel recorders, and a humble array of reverberation, delay, and echo effects. Chris Hash joined as a permanent member of the group in the summer of 2008 to lend his psilocybin saturated violin to the mix. The band is prolific in it’s output, though sadly many of the recordings have never seen the light of day outside of a small circle of friends. The music itself oscillates between enthused modes of movement by emulating oceanic currents, flowing air streams, shimmering copper, whale and bird song, and other meta-scaled natural phenomenon, as well as more definite and recognizable musical influences from jazz, folk, avant-garde electronic compositions, krautrock, and candy pop.