Dead Voices on Air is Mark Spybey's experimental and industrial project formed after his departure from Zoviet France. Dead Voices on Air has collaborated with artists such as cEvin Key ( Skinny Puppy) in Download, Not Breathing , Rapoon and corporatE unclE.

Spybey started his career in the North-East of England with Zoviet France in the late eighties before moving to Vancouver. It was here that Dead Voices On Air were formed. Spybey also worked under the name Propeller and was an original member of Download, who included members of Skinny Puppy.  After leaving Download, he started a series of collaborations, appearing on over 50 albums in a five-year period. Perhaps his most significant honor was being asked to be part of CAN guitarist Michael Karoli’s band Sofortkontakt! and appearing at the Can 30th anniversary shows in 1999. Spybey was a close friend of Michael Karoli prior to his death in 2001 and had toured with him as part of legendary CAN vocalist Damo Suzuki’s Network in 1998 in North America, appearing in the German TV film by Peter Braatz, “On the Air.”

Spybey has recorded, toured and played live with numerous collaborators including Faust, Michael Rother (Neu!) and Dieter Moebius (Cluster), members of The Legendary Pink Dots, Mick Harris (Scorn, Painkiller, Napalm Death), Jarboe (Swans), Simon Fisher Turner, Richard Sanderson, James Plotkin (Flux, Old, Scorn), Robert Hampson (Loop/Main), Jochen Arbeit (Einzturzende Neubaten), Darryl Neudorf and Sugarpill (Abintra), Not Breathing, Pigface, Martin Atkins, and Genesis P Orridge. He has worked with a number of record companies, including Kranky, Nettwerk, Invisible, Cold Spring and Soleilmoon.

Spybey was part of the band Beehatch with the late Phil Western of Download, who released three albums and toured Europe. In 2004 he formed Reformed Faction, a duo with founding member of Zoviet France and Rapoon mainstay Robin Storey. The band have released a number of albums and have played live in both Europe and North America.

It is his work as Dead Voices on Air that perhaps most accurately defines the essence of his sound and the techniques that he has developed in a career spanning more than three decades. In the mid nineties, he released five Dead Voices on Air albums in a three-year period, whilst also recording the first two Download albums, two Propeller records and a dozen collaborations with other artists. Following the release of “Piss Frond,” (“the most cohesive product I could ever imagine,” Ink Nineteen) he has continued to play live, collaborate and to release work. Lot’s of work.

Village Voice referred to Dead Voices on Air as an almost medieval drone: “If most ambient is the laudanum of the new fin de siécle, then Dead Voices on Air are the absinthe." Spybey continues to make music with real instruments; rhythms cultivated by hand from his love of ethnological music and the usual array of grainy sounds and effected vocals. He describes it as “music for the eyes”. “Spybey works hard at his art so you don’t have to: rather, as the listener, the participant, the absorber, it’s more important you ignore such now pat genre appellations as ‘industrial’, ‘ambient’, ‘soundscape’, et al, and instead gorge deeply on a wriggling, prickly, sometimes confrontational puzzlebox of sounds”. Darren Bergstein.

Spybey has a large group of friends from around the world who actively contribute to the work of Dead Voices on Air.

eH title from these artists

DVOA Back Catalog Releases