In “Aura Trans”, Andreas Lutz doesn’t just play with language – he lovingly dissects it, feeds it through an algorithmic blender, and serves it back as a shimmering, glitchy soufflé. Known for his installations, performances, and audio-visual experiments that probe the limits of human-machine interaction, Lutz now dives ears-first into the sonic shadows of speech, reimagining the voice not as a conveyor of meaning but as raw, manipulable material.
This is the first in a new series that builds on his earlier “Abstract Language Model” work – where the focus was visual and symbolic – but now pivots toward the auditory. Using recordings of spoken language from across the globe, Lutz strips them down to their spectrograms, distorts time and frequency like a digital Dali, and resynthesizes them into glimmering ghost-versions of their former selves. These are not field recordings in the traditional sense – they’re phonic phantoms, vapor trails of meaning.
The album glides between micro-compositions and more expansive ambient soundscapes. Longer pieces like “transu” and “trans=” feel like dreamwalks through forgotten speech, with textures that hover between the human and the post-human. Shorter interludes punctuate the flow – some under 30 seconds – like mysterious radio signals intercepted from another dimension. The whole structure reads less like an album and more like a sonic codex, each track a glyph, each tone a cryptic phoneme in a language without grammar.
There’s a sly humor in the album’s concept, too. By repurposing the ubiquitous human voice – a sound we’re bombarded with daily – into abstract musical gestures, Lutz pokes at the idea that language is inherently meaningful. He’s turned global chatter into a choir of spectral artifacts, like a futuristic opera where the libretto has been chewed up and reassembled by a sentient vocoder.
“Aura Trans” isn’t for everyone. It won’t hum along in the background while you cook dinner. But for those curious about the boundaries of sound, language, and perception, this is an engrossing, oddly beautiful collection. It’s like overhearing a conversation in a dream, where the words don’t make sense – but the feeling sticks with you anyway.
— Vito Camarretta via Chain D.L.K.
