So what’s in a voice? Not qualitatively, or to another person, but within the confines of your own body: what is your voice? I know technically all it is is your vocal chords flapping together (incessantly, by the way, everyone says so) and pushing air out through your contorted mouth in some sort of socially meaningful way, but what is it? Is it an appendage of some sort, like a invisible arm reaching out into the world in acts of manipulation? Or is it more like a thought, like neurons firing, only outward, forming ephemeral aural impressions of what’s going on in your head? (No seriously, we all think you talk too much.) When you speak, does your voice still belong to you, or does it now belong to the eardrums of everyone around? What if you’re talking to yourself? What if you record it? OK, Sir/Madam Yaps-A-Lot, since you’re so smart, what if your voice is pumped through a machine which compounds upon it new sounds, and strips away all but the fundamental tone of your voice? Is it still yours? Is it still even a voice? Now let’s say it’s around 1990 or so. You get a letter from a Mr. Ralf Wehowsky of Frankfurt. It contains one (1) prose poem, in German, and one (1) request that you read it into a microphone and send him the recording. Sounds like fun, sounds totally avant-garde, and you do it. A year later, he sends you a CD called Pullover, credited to his initials—RLW—and as you listen, in amongst shards and fragments of static, drone, and noise, suddenly it stops on a dime, and you hear a fragment, just a snippet, of your own voice, reading in German, before it’s subsumed again by grating digitalia, wafting away under the murk. Is it your voice now? Are you sure?

And there’s the central question of Ralf Wehowsky’s career: whose sound is it anyway? Yes, this sounds like the sort of idea that an Oberlin undergrad would come up with after a bender of Adorno and Derrida and enough bong hits to wash away the boredom of four years in the ivy-covered bubbles of his own skin. (Dear Oberlin, Just kiddin’! There aren’t enough bong hits for that.) But what separates Ralf from your cousin Brad is not only that, after about 15 years’ worth of albums, this question begins to border on obsessive vision quest; but that your cousin Brad can’t pack either the visceral kick or the sensitivity and awareness of space. Now, this isn’t your little brother’s noise, it’s not that kind of kick; there’s more in common here with the onkyo or electro-acoustic improv scene (scene?) than with the pummelling of your Merzbows and Wolf Eyeses, using silence as a foundation and tension-builder for the, um, music glazed over top. This is seen most bracingly on the aforementioned Pullover (cute diminutive German for “sweater”), which contains just as much silence as sound, and just as much discernible voice as manipulated noise wrung from them. Based on the prose of Markus Caspers, and read by a diverse group of musicians and other friends. On this track we start with a short burst of static (bear in mind, the entire album builds to a fever pitch over about 40 minutes), and then… nothing, a rich, tense nothing from which the drones morph into a little girl’s voice, into static, and into silence again. A man, I think either Jim O’Rourke or David Grubbs (who are actually secretly the same person anyway), begins to sing the text, in a high falsetto, with little cracks and splinters of effects dripping from it, until it too is subsumed under the whimsical noise of its true master. Another voice follows—the most oft-recurring voice on the album, I believe it’s Wehowsky’s own—says a few works, then is mangled mercilessly. It’s a heady sort of rush—the kids call it “mind-blowing,” but they say that about everything—and a rare one. His 2000 CD Points of Reference takes that idea even a little further out to sea. Halfway through the album opener, we hear what sounds like nothing so mundane as rain. Then, as the drones underneath well up once more, the sound takes on a new effect—it just sounds like static now. And what’s that weird lapping noise at the end? And that ticking? Wehowsky claims that organic sound sources were used on the album. What the hell is that supposed to mean?

And then there’s the beast that is Tulpas, a five-CD box set released by his own label Selektion in 1997—a set of remixes and recreations by musicians and artists of varying technical ability. Easy enough to grasp. But, true to form, Wehowsky recreates at least some of the recreations—editing, mixing, adding, subtracting, we don’t actually know—to fit together more smoothly as a massive, ungainly whole. To keep it real, it’s quite an experience (don’t recommend taking it in all at once, even if you do have that kind of time), and almost silent as a cathedral throughout. Occasional collaborator Francisco Lopez has a redux on here. For those who don’t know, Lopez is a Madrid-based sound artist and biologist who apparently knows more about your eardrums than you do, and is more than happy to use that information against you. Dude gets loud. His track here, well, it sounds not much like Wehowsky, but an awful lot like Lopez’s usual silence-to-oppressive-noise trick. Except where’s the oppressive noise? It builds, but in an oddly muted way, with the sound more spread out around the space rather than just compressed at the edges for max damage. It’s like… it’s like he’s even doing this at all. Is he? I have no idea. Who’s sound is this? Well, it’s says “RLW” on the packaging. That’ll have to do.