Michel Banabila’s ‘Through Global Frequency’ Sends Voices Across the Dial

Voices from around the world read Banabila’s words over quietly shifting electronics on Through Global Frequency, released by Glasgow’s 12th Isle.

Michel Banabila’s shockingly beautiful Through Global Frequency began as something much smaller. The Dutch composer initially wrote a poem that linked to fragments of music he had released over the past few years, but the idea kept expanding as he followed it. “At the beginning of this journey, I had no clear idea of what I was getting into,” he writes in release notes. “What started as a simple poem, with embedded audio links referencing a selection of recordings I had made over the past few years… eventually evolved into a video project designed as a proposal for an installation. Ultimately, it culminated in this music album.”

Over the past four decades, Banabila has built a wide-ranging discography that moves easily between ambient electronics, film soundtracks and experimental composition. He’s released more than 40 albums on labels like Tapu Records and Bureau B, along with a steady stream of collaborations and self-released projects. Throughout it all, he’s returned again and again to voice, texture and atmosphere as central elements in his music.

Through Global Frequency gathers readings from friends and collaborators scattered across the globe, each voice captured in the most ordinary way possible: phones, home recorders, whatever happened to be nearby. Banabila leaned into the individuality of those recordings rather than smoothing them out. “I am incredibly grateful for the amazing voice recordings that friends and family from all over the world sent me,” he writes. “Every voice here is uniquely recognisable and reflects how I know them.”

The structure recalls projects where spoken language becomes part of a musical framework, including Brian Eno’s Drums Between the Bells. In an interview I conducted with Eno in 2011, he described the underlying idea this way, one that applies to Banabila’s work, too: “We are all singing. We call it speech, but we’re singing to each other, and I thought, as soon as you put spoken word onto music, you start to hear it like singing anyway. You start to develop musical value and musical weight, and you start to notice how this word falls on that beat, and so on and so on. So in a way I think I was trying to draw more attention to the fact that everybody is a singer — everybody who uses their voice is kind of singing.”

Banabila’s project arrives at that same realization from a more informal place: voices recorded by friends and family in different languages, gathered from different corners of the world, then shaped into a single sequence of pieces.

The project also carries a sharper emotional current beneath its gentle surface. Banabila describes the album as a response to the political climate surrounding him, and to the hostile tone of contemporary discourse. “I felt the need to create something warm, something that embraced diversity,” he writes, positioning the record against “my government’s fucking migration policies, its deceit toward the Palestinian people, and all these hate posts circulating online in this time.” For Banabila, the impulse is personal as well as political. “Making music has always been a way to stay sane,” he adds, “and I have always loved working with voice recordings.”

The album arrives on the excellent Glasgow label 12th Isle, a quietly adventurous imprint that has built a reputation for thoughtful, boundary-blurring releases across electronic music, ambient and experimental work.

The vinyl edition is available through the In Sheep’s Clothing shop and likely won’t sit around long.