Tip! Electric Dead Speak. Music inspired by the Electronic Voice Phenomenon amplifies one of sound culture’s strangest obsessions into a collective ritual. Eighth Tower Records brings together twelve distinct voices - RhaD, Yousef Kawar, Kokum, Sílení, Pnévmma, Mario Lino Stancati, Richard Bégin, Oubys, The Resa, Nerthus, Nikos Sotirelis and Insectarium - to probe the contested territory of Electronic Voice Phenomenon, where inexplicable voices captured on tape or digital media have, since the 1950s, been heard as messages from the dead or as ghosts generated by technology and human projection. Rather than offering a thesis, the compilation treats EVP as a charged metaphor and a sonic toolkit, asking what it means to listen for something that might not be there - and what it means when you still hear it.

Across its twelve tracks, the album investigates the shifting borderland between technology, death and the persistence of consciousness. EVP traditionally lives in that liminal space where science and mysticism overlap, where noise becomes speech and speech collapses back into static. The artists translate this ambiguity into sound: drones that seem to carry distant vowels, mechanical pulsations that mimic a failing life support system, spectral harmonics that hang just at the edge of comprehension, decomposed field recordings that crumble as you focus on them. Each contributor approaches the theme from their own angle - some with cold, forensic restraint, others with near‑ritual intensity - but all share a fascination with the moment where signal and hallucination become indistinguishable.

The compilation’s architecture reinforces its conceptual core. Early pieces introduce the EVP zone in relatively stark terms, foregrounding tape hiss, shortwave shiver and clipped, almost intelligible fragments that might be words or might be artefacts. As the sequence unfolds, the textures grow denser and more immersive: layers of environmental sound, processed voices, buried rhythms and sub‑bass swells accumulate, pulling the listener into a space that feels simultaneously technological and occult. At times, tracks evoke abandoned transmitter stations, server farms humming in the dark, or forgotten answering machines looping their last messages; at others, they resemble slow‑motion invocations, with disembodied choirs and distant knocks on the walls of the mix. The recording devices themselves start to feel like protagonists, not neutral tools but unstable portals.

The presence of such a varied roster is crucial to the compilation’s impact. Each artist subtly extends the EVP metaphor in different directions. One might lean into brittle, high‑frequency crackle and sudden cuts, highlighting EVP as an artefact of media and error. Another bathes splintered voice grains in cavernous reverb, turning them into liturgical echoes from an unnamed chapel. Elsewhere, stealthy, almost rhythmic pulses suggest the ghost of industrial music, as if machines were remembering their operators. Collectively, these approaches underline how Electronic Voice Phenomenon is as much about listening practice as it is about paranormal belief: by inviting us to search for messages in noise, it reveals how eager we are to populate the void.

Faithful to the dark, speculative aesthetic that defines Eighth Tower Records, Electric Dead Speak also resonates with our current technological condition. In a moment when artificial intelligence and algorithmic processes constantly filter, predict and “speak” on our behalf, the idea of disembodied voices emerging from circuits feels less like an anomaly and more like a daily reality. EVP becomes a metaphor for our relationship with the unknown layers of the systems we use - code, data, networks whose operations we sense but rarely see. The compilation doesn’t flatten that insight into simple critique; instead, it stages an aural séance where these questions can be felt as much as thought. Are we picking up transmissions from beyond, or amplifying the hidden noise of our own minds and machines? Electric Dead Speak refuses to decide, leaving the listener suspended in that tension, ears pricked, waiting for the next phrase to materialise out of the static.