Available on: Prologue LP

Italian techno producers Donato Dozzy and Neel’s collaborative project, Voices From The Lake, is a low-key but high-concept work, less an album of discrete tracks and more an immersive experience in an alien environment.

Over 71 minutes, Dozzy and Neel evoke an imaginary location – the titular lakescape – in minute and thoroughly engrossing detail. Against a near-constant backdrop – soft, aqueous bass wreathed in drifting, abstract sounds; the steady clacking beat of a wood block; birdsong all around – they shift the mood almost imperceptibly with subtle additions and alterations. A double note dapples the surface of ‘Circe’, like a pebble sending ripples out into water; a rhythmic loop encircles ‘Meikyu’ insistently; ‘Twins In Virgo (Reprise)’ lies in repose on a bed of supple, warm bass.

The humid drone that forms the album’s foundation is a musical lens trained steadily on Dozzy and Neel’s vision: there’s a sense of calm that’s disrupted gradually by the creeping eerieness of the solitude they capture. As observers, they are at once removed from the ecosystem they depict and shrouded in it: the unblinking focus in fact adds to the mystique of what they – and we – are looking at. What is so compelling about it? Dozzy and Neel’s music imputes mystical, mythical qualities to their lake: Voices From The Lake is serene and sinister, hides more than it reveals and is so entirely absorbing that you could lose yourself in it indefinitely.


Alex Macpherson

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