(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Per ten years Voice Farm (essentially Charly Brown and Myke Reilly) stubbornly kept playing the San Francisco club circuit with their punk dance music for synths, percussion, and voice. Their harmonies are ethereal and relaxed, the exact opposite of the apocalyptic new wave of the early 1980s.
The album World We Live In (Optional, 1982) is, in retrospect, a masterful example of instrumental music for the cyber-age: the urban neuroses of A.m. City culminate in the exquisitely delicate industrial music of Davy's Big Battle, dotted with melodic counterpoints. Both in these symphonic poems and in the aseptic ballads of Beatnik (with frenzies and syncopations borrowed from Talking Heads and Television) and Double Garage (in the same resigned spleen, the same mechanical languor), Voice Farm paint modest sketches of industrial alienation, managing to build unsettling and intoxicating atmospheres without resorting to walls of dissonance or Wagnerian intensity. Theirs is an entirely internal gothic, filtered through deliria and nightmares of solitary souls.
The self-titled album five years later (on Ralph) documents the duos compositional and lyrical maturity, as they now lean toward songs that are at once more sung and more heavily arranged. This intellectual disco music (Johnny Belinda) does not, however, possess the same charm (or foresight) as the earlier work.
Taking advantage of renewed interest in their music, Voice Farm returned in 1991 with Bigger Cooler Weirder (Morgan Creek) and a sound updated to the age of cyberpunki.e., a sound that is a derivative of a derivative of the genre they themselves had helped create a decade earlier.
They later released The Love Experiment (Nice Tone, 1995) and reformed two decades later for Super Nova Experts (Nice Tone, 2008).
