Voice Actor Shares Some of Her Secrets

After several years shrouded in mystery, the beguiling ambient / experimental artist gives her first-ever press interview.

Noa Kurzweil isn’t a big fan of interviews. Before last week, she’d never actually agreed to do one, and as it turns out, she even all that interesting in reading interviews with other artists. We may be living in a time when many musicians feel obligated to share as much of themselves as possible online, laying bare every detail of their artistic process, but even with all of this information floating around, Kurzweil doesn’t feel a strong urge to know what’s behind the curtain, preferring instead to formulate her own thoughts and narratives about whatever she’s listening to.

The listening public, however, often feels differently, and when greeted with a lack of information, people tend to fill in the blanks themselves. That’s certainly been the case when it comes to Kurzweil’s Voice Actor project, which mysteriously surfaced on the STROOM label in late 2022 with Sent from My Telephone, a sprawling, digital-only, 110-track debut album that ran for more than four hours and, crucially, arrived with little in the way of backstory or supplemental context. In combination with the LP’s unorthodox format, that lack of information almost certainly fueled some of the fervor around the hypnotically immersive, genre-blurring release, which quickly became something of a sensation within ambient and experimental music circles. Online sleuths gleaned small details about the project from the album credits, and additional bits of information—some of which weren’t entirely accurate—could be found in various record store listings and the promotional blurbs penned by promoters and festivals who’d booked Voice Actor to perform. But even as the accolades piled up, it remained largely unclear who exactly was behind the project, where they were from, how their music was made and what, if anything, that music was about.

Those clamoring for a physical release of Sent from My Telephone were satiated (somewhat) by 2023’s Fake Sleep, which offered approximately a dozen selections from the album with a handful of new songs. Yet the mystery around the project persisted, and continued right up until last week, when STROOM dropped a new album, Lust (1), that’s credited to Voice Actor and another artist, Squu. It’s a fantastic record—perhaps you saw me raving about its spellbinding sounds right here in the newsletter—but like its predecessors, it provoked all sorts of questions. Sent from My Telephone had been credited to Kurzweil and another artist named Levi Lanser, but only the former seemed to be involved in the making of Lust (1). Had something happened? Who was Squu, and how did he fit into the picture? There were no answers to be found in the text that accompanied the album, which—no joke—primarily talked about farming.

My curiosity piqued, I took a shot in the dark and asked STROOM if Voice Actor might be up for a chat, and even after I was initially told that she didn’t want to do any interviews, I politely insisted, figuring that I didn’t have much to lose in making the attempt. Much to my surprise, I received an email a few days later introducing me to Kurzweil, and late last week, we hopped on a video call and began to talk. Given the lack of concrete information out there about Voice Actor, our conversation started at the very beginning, as she explained the project’s genesis, its evolving personnel and how she wound up releasing a 110-track album. Along the way, we also touched on some of her musical background, her approach to vocals—which, as anyone who’s heard a Voice Actor record knows, are key to the project’s appeal—and what it’s been like to play live and take her music out into the real world. It was an illuminating discussion, and although Kurzweil isn’t yet inclined to spell out every single facet of her work, this interview does find her taking some pretty significant steps out of the shadows.