This second album from this enigmatic Noa Kurzweil project marks a somewhat surprising detour from Voice Actor's sprawling and eclectic debut Sent From My Telephone, as Kurzweil's previous creative foil (ana reme's Levi Lanser) has been replaced by Welsh producer Ol Bryan. The result is a considerably leaner, more stylistically focused, and more experimentally minded release that inventively and sensuously blends deconstructed dub-techno, sound art, and ASMR. Notably, the familiar seductive purr of Kurzweil's voice is also regularly chopped up, processed, decontextualized, and looped into rhythmic elements, melodic hooks, or textural layers.
That's a boldly counterintuitive stylistic choice akin to Scanner's shift away from intercepted phone conversations, as Kurzweil's bewitching voice and charmingly diaristic (and oft-surreal) monologues previously seemed like the project's very essence. I certainly miss those elements a bit, as well as Voice Actor's tendency to regularly blindside me with curveballs like unsettling samples of 9/11 radio chatter and nods to '60s French pop, but Lust (1) is nevertheless an extremely cool & absorbing headphone album in its own right. The closing "Barbara" is probably the zenith, as Kurzweil languorously muses about Barbara Walters' condescending treatment of Dolly Parton before the piece unexpectedly blossoms into a killer outsider/futuristic R&B motif of digitized loops and soul diva samples. The ghostly & seductive "Look Nice" offers still more pop-adjacent bliss, while "Fields" feels like the warmly beautiful dreams of an android with a soul.
Like its predecessor, Lust (1) can occasionally come across as a bit sketchlike, but there is considerably more depth hidden beneath the surface this time around, as beauty and magic are almost always lurking in both the vividly realized details and the hallucinatory ways that Kurzweil's voice subtly transforms and moves through space.
