ribs recordings

In the wake of an interview with Tricky in 2008, Mark Fisher made the following observation on the polyvocals used in his music:

It is an art of splitting which is also an art of doubling. Through the women who sing for/as him, Tricky becomes less than one, a split subject that can never be restored to wholeness. Yet their voicing of his incompleteness also makes him more than one, a double in search of a lost other half it will never recover. Either way, what Tricky unsettles – both as a vocalist and as a writer/ producer who coaxes singing from an Other – is the idea of the voice as a rock solid guarantor of presence and identity (2014: 44).

While this simultaneous splitting and doubling requires more than one voice on a track to occur, not all tracks containing multiple voices unsettle or produce the implicit vocal presence of an Other that Fisher identifies. The song ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by The Human League, for example, can be felt as a dialogue between two wholes, following a clear call-and-response structure. Similarly, harmonised vocal lines in bands like ABBA or Tears For Fears suppose more of a eurythmic plurality than an incomplete other. The constant appears to be the following: voices that retain a clear character and presence, both separate and in unison, do not unsettle. The sonic invocation of an indeterminate consciousness, both split and doubled, emerges through a process of desynchronisation – disturbances to presence and identity embedded in the recombination of  the voice/s.

On the lyrics of the song ‘Aftermath’ in his debut album Maxinquaye – “your eyes resemble mine | you’ll see as no others can” (1:35) – Tricky muses on who or what he could have been talking about,  landing on the loss of his mother. Recalling that she used to write poetry, he ventures “It’s almost like she killed herself to give me the opportunity, my lyrics, I can never understand why I write as a female; I think I’ve got my Mum’s talent, I’m her vehicle. So I need a woman to sing that.” (Fisher 43). The coaxing of his mother’s voice from another (and naming of the track ‘aftermath’ where perhaps ‘afterlife’ would have seemed more fitting) not only dissolves the ‘I’ implicit to an essentialist understanding of voice, but also produces a restless mobility across different ontologies – that of the living and dead, the surface of the body in flesh (the eyes that resemble) and the voice disembodied (who is speaking?).

In an article published around the album’s release in the The Wire Magazine, Ian Penman uses the term ‘Black secret Tricknology’ as though Tricky himself (and his British-Ghanaian background) performs a sonic sleight of hand: “Tricky whispers, he doesn’t scream, and it’s all the more unsettling […] On Maxinquaye Tricky has made (of) himself a machine capable of projecting a whole galaxy/phalanx of contradictory personae. “And as I grow, I grow collective”.. [Tricky 1:38]” (1995: 19 of 27 paras). The personae at once voiced and induced by Tricky takes on a form of necromancy that schisms rather than recedes, filling its crevices with the collective. 

Contrary to Penman’s eagerness to relegate Tricky’s vocal method to the world of black magic, Musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim makes a compelling argument against superimposing the act of “channeling” on the voice;

If we strip away our projections about a vocal sound’s meaning and the vocalizer’s intention, we no longer hear a voice or a vocalizer as “channeling” another voice. […] This listening practice debunks vocal timbre as autobiography, gender, race, and expression of the deepest essence, allowing listeners to understand vocal timbre as skill, artistry, and communicative intention. Ears turned away from a detailed and practical knowledge of vocal production perpetuate the micropolitics of timbre (168).

At the heart of Eidsheim’s point lies a rejection of the voice as essence, and the idea that “to have a voice is to have a soul, and to hear a voice is to access the soul” (161). However, in Tricky’s music, the voice of the lost Other is not so much channelled as it is repossessed through the occulting/ extending of the self: Not only does he “grow collective” through the mixing of multiple vocals, but he also attunes the register of his own voice in a way that aurally pluralises its presence. It is less so the practice of channelling (or rather the verb “channelling” is less easily ascribable by the listener) and more so a kind of vocal propagation. On the song ‘Christiansands’ he assumes an almost polyphonic overtone – reified in the rasped lyrics “I’ll master your language | And in the meantime | I’ll create my own” (Tricky 2:09). The voice here doesn’t pose as access to the soul, it scatters the very assumption of soul as singular.

The grain of the voice as defined by Roland Barthes is- 

something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages, […] as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings. (181).

The grain, through his abstracting of the single skin, puts words to what Tricky perturbs.

The sampled cry “Let me tell you about my mother” in ‘Aftermath’ is drawn from the cynically spoken line of an undercover human-replicant in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, during a scene in which its pupils are being monitored for symptoms of replicant artificiality. The idea of the other as a kind of prosthetic rendering of the self foregrounds the tension between the sample’s origins, and the lyrical theme of ocular resemblance in the song: that between resemblance and replication, but perhaps more completely, the other that feels familiar and the familiar that feels other. In its schismatic quality, the grain of Tricky’s voice mimics the vocal plurality of the track itself – he imbibes into his “inner flesh” the grain of another. 

Dean Blunt, an artist that bears interesting parallels with Tricky (although emerging a decade too late to be his contemporary) is a deft manifestation of vocal unsettling as aurally affecting. I talk about Blunt’s song “Rinsed” briefly in my zine ‘Sonicsthesia’ as an instance in which the voice’s resonance performs a mimesis of the superimposition of the song on the listener’s diegesis: both voices resound above the music, directly into your ear, while the stripped back guitar (perhaps here the third lost voice) remains ten feet away. Dean Blunt, similar to Tricky in his beguiling relationships with his chosen female collaborators (Joane Robertson, Inga Copeland), thus induces a splitting and doubling through the hauntingly intimate rendering of the voice in production; Where Penman asks “Where does the singer’s voice go when it is erased from the dub track?” (1995: 16 of 27 paras), Blunt incurs the question of where the listener’s personal diegesis goes when it is spoken over.

W. J. T Mitchel ventured that the desire of the painting “is to change places with the beholder, to transfix or paralyse the beholder, turning him into an image for the gaze of the picture in what might be called “the Medusa effect”” (76). Could the same be said for the desire of the song that perturbs? That ultimately what it wants is to momentarily change places with its listeners’ diegesis?  

Within this framework, vocal unsettling is not only in the experience of listening, but also the condition of being momentarily displaced by it. The plural voice reconfigures the listener’s own diegesis, effecting a temporary transposing of place between subject and sound. Like Tricky’s mother coursing through him, it is the voice rendered shadow; it is a doubling without threat.

Works cited:

Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘The grain of the Voice’, in Image Music Text. Trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press).

Blunt, Dean. ‘Rinsed’. Rinsed. World Music. 2023. Track 1.
>https://open.spotify.com/track/7HXkG71tnUPgjeMEP9688d?si=5daeef8d18a44cc8

Mitchell, W. J. T. October 1996. ‘What Do Pictures ‘Really’ Want?. The MIT Press, vol. 77: 71–82

Partridge, Christopher. 2013. The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular music, the sacred, and the profane. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Penman, Ian. March 1995. ‘Black Secret Tricknology’. The Wire Magazine. (no. 133)

http://www.moon-palace.de/tricky/wire95.html [Accessed 17 November 2025]: 27 paragraphs

Sun Eidsheim, Nina. 2019. The race of sound : listening, timbre, and vocality
in African American music. (Duke University Press).

Tricky. ‘Aftermath’. Maxinquaye. Island Records. 1995. Track 6.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5reVzrX7DYn3v3Db6OmtYE?si=1ab6eb2e999f467e
—. ‘Hell Is Around The Corner’. Maxinquaye. Island Records. 1995. Track 4. >https://open.spotify.com/track/2wC0qK8JN6gblb0ZJzE2d9?si=4064d619aae34540
—. ‘Christiansands’. Pre Millenium Tension. Island Records. 1996. Track 2. >https://open.spotify.com/track/413DSZdM15Uz3oHHLycuKK?si=554fd1d00aca4bc0