Voice Actor’s 109-track Sent From My Telephone is a surreal, fathomless dream

It's taken me a minute to get around to posting this one because, well, it's 109 tracks long, and I got other shit to do. But after spending countless late-night hours with mysterious artist Voice Actor's massive, utterly hypnotic, 109-track, three-and-a-half-hour-long dark horse AOTY contender Sent From My Telephone since it dropped a couple weeks back, I'm now officially in love. The record feels like the kind of hidden gem that definitely would've been a modest blog hit back when people wrote about new music with genuine breathless excitement; it's a hazy, dreamlike union of a bunch of our favorite things -- '90s hip-hop sampling, Félicia Atkinson's hushed, mesmeric spoken word, Mica Levi + Tirzah's magical collaborative work, woozy trip-hop, eerie and obscure lo-fi folk, Dean Blunt, etc. -- that becomes more captivating, disorienting, and impossible to shake the deeper you get. Sent From My Telephone is sequenced in alphabetical order, so I don't think the artist would be too bothered if you threw this thing on shuffle and let it creep up on, disarm, and ultimately astonish you with its fathomless breadth and scope. Listen below (if you're feeling overwhelmed, start with "Battling Dust", "Carefully", and/or "Floating Signifiers") + count on this one to land somewhere in the top 10 on our year-end albums list. Shout out to Pat for the heads up.