Mark Spybey, after dissolving Zoviet France and moving to Vancouver, launched the project Dead Voices On Air in 1993.

On New Words Machine (Hypnotic, 1995) he attempts a fusion of industrial and ambient modes. For twenty minutes, Dream Catcher does nothing but recycle noises, planing down their rough edges. This practice reaches spasmodic levels of anguish in the eleven final minutes of Vuls, amid increasingly piercing drones.

On the thirteen instrumental vignettes of Hafted Maul (Invisible, 1995), however, Spybey lets his layering method get the better of him, often resulting in the prolixity reminiscent of Zoviet France. The “found noises” and scattered instrumental chords could compose a suggestive soundtrack of urban civilization, but Spybey fails to transcend the documentary.

Then, as so often happens in Britain, albums came in a flood: Shap (Invisible, 1996), with Zev Asher of Nimrod, an experiment in human voice manipulation; How Hollow Heart (Invisible, 1996), in the old-school horror-industrial style; Fire In The Bronx Zoo (Invisible, 1997), a collaboration with David Wright of Not Breathing, remixing compositions by both; Piss Frond (Invisible, 1998), a double album of “songs” covering a huge stylistic territory (even venturing into trip-hop); and Frankie Pett Presents The Happy Submarines (Invisible, 2000).

Mark Spybey formed the avantgarde collective Propeller in Vancouver. The project debuted with Rame (Scratch, 1996), a bold collage of sounds and voices that secretes a surreal ambience. More a notebook than a record, it proved that a musician can create music out of the manipulation of all sorts of sonic sources.

A much more organic approach made Oro (Scratch, 1998) a milestone recording in its genre, a zoo of processed sounds and an elegant fashion parade of lo-fi ambience. It opens with an ambient concert for burbling noises, distant metallic vibrations and a slow piano song. Then a loud distortion is circled by a whirling buzz; the third track lets reverbed beats drown into a maelstrom of ghostly electronics; the fifth dilates Eric Pounder's vocal improvisations into a cosmic drone; The seventh piece is almost a baroque fugue played with a new age nonchalance, a cello-like fluctuation counterpointing a harp-like tinkling. The eleventh conceives a tribal beat out of radio frequencies. The 18th's extended notes have a somber quality, like in an organ requiem.
The eight is a lengthy study on slowly-mutating drones that only towards the end reveals the voices hidden within them. The 14th has a similar development but pivots on changing timbres.

Spybey also collaborated to A Peripheral Bluer with James Plotkin and to Bad Roads Young Drivers with Mick Harris.

By leveraging so many years of experiments, with Frankie Pett Presents (Invisible, 2001) Dead Voices On Air achieved a "cinematic" or "photographic" quality: the apparently anarchic, unfocused strings of sounds that compose a song are actually details of a scene, usually a squalid, harrowing one. Case in point: We Fire Cotton, Sweet Garbage Streets.

DVOA released millions of albums: From Labrador to Madagascar (2008), Fast Falls the Eventide (2009), The Silent Wing (2010), From Afar All Stars Spark and Glee (2010), Michael and the Angels Fought (2011), Pieta (2012), Mawson’s Will And Other Stories (2012), Y Para Ba (2013), Y Para Be (2013), Did Digger Do Jehovah (2014), Musiclab Bratislava (2015), Pontiac 2000 (2015), Sample Me (2015), Seattle Future Space (2015), Vanklaverland (2015), Flojt (2016), Marz Rose (2017), Anschlag (2018), Mirror Carrier (2018), Silver the Prows (2019), Stone Cross Shuttle Worn (2020), With Hidden Noise (2020), Semple Soma Waal (2022), Wass (2022), Mikrocosmos (2023), All to No End Save Beauty (2023), :jamiel:spybey: (2023), dadu: tutu: (2025), Silence, Melt and Mourn (2025), etc.