Throughout a class of genres and micro-genres, there seems to be a new musical vocabulary emerging, one centered around the way vocals are being manipulated to create moods and atmospheres defined by their amorphous, often spectral nature. Ghost voices. It's something like what happened in the film Inception, the way music could be heard through layers of dreams. That effect-- as though sound were floating through several walls of consciousness, its outlines blurred to be almost unidentifiable-- has something to do with the fact that we've heard a lot of these vocals before in their original form; they're often samples that have been resurrected and re-articulated to express a sort of new slang. You can hear it in dance music and hypnagogic pop, in witch house, drone, and art rock, the various presentations just as disparate as they are interconnected.

Few artists at the moment are experimenting with the vocal more aggressively than 22-year-old London producer James Blake, who's used the dodgier end of dubstep as a starting point from which he can take the human voice apart piece-by-piece, putting everything back together again in new, incandescent forms. Classically trained but a child of the 1990s, Blake has played around with turn-of-the-century R&B vocal terrain, most memorably those of Aaliyah and Kelis. "Vocals have sentimental value... and I've always wanted to sample things that I already love," Blake told XLR8R in June. "Nowadays those [R&B] vocals really sit in your subconscious.... I think using them taps into a massive subconscious in our generation.... People don't just want to hear them straight; they want to hear echoes of them in their dance music." We hear echoes of music history in nearly everything we put to our ears, but this particular form of expression has extra resonance because of how our brains process the voice. It connects those who hear to one another, and also draws lines between memories.

The marriage we hear now between dance music and julienned R&B vocal samples nods to the work of Burial and his now landmark 2007 album, Untrue. Not merely an impossibly haunting update on UK garage and two-step at time of its release, Untrue has also become a blueprint for many artists hoping to conjure equally murky, impenetrable, self-encompassing atmospherics. "I wanted to make a glowing record, I wanted to cheer myself up," Burial's Will Bevan told The Wire in December of that year. "I was listening to these [A] Guy Called Gerald tunes. I wanted to do vocals, but I can't get a proper singer like him. So I cut up a cappellas and made different sentences, even if they didn't make sense, but they summed up what I was feeling."

Bevan built melodic foundations out of androgynous whispers, sample reconstructions that shapeshifted and evaporated above the crackle of slow rain and dark, growling bass. But vocal manipulation itself isn't new, nor is the style of shadowed, nocturnal tones that color so much of dubstep. If you wanted you could draw lines from T-Pain to Kanye to Todd Edwards to Prefuse 73 and on back, with stops along the way for Luomo's Vocalcity, the KLF's Chill Out, Kraftwerk's vocodered melodies, King Tubby's dub, and Steve Reich's tape experiments. But what we're hearing now, as framed by Burial and articulated further by James Blake, is the synthesis of 90s trip-hop, British dance music from jungle to 2-step to rave, and forward-thinking R&B, especially the eerie melodies penned for Aaliyah by Steven "Static Major." Much of Untrue, like the music it seems to have inspired, is simultaneously urban and monastic. "Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people, you let it in, you're more open to it," Bevan explained to The Wire. "Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you."

These voices seem to reinforce the feeling of isolation, of being sealed away in a recording with voices that inevitably take on qualities of your own choosing and interpretation. It's not just that we complete them, but that we translate them, too. Here are some of the most compelling coded transmissions from the past few years.

Burial

"Ghost Hardware"

"Ghost Hardware" is built with the same fogged-up parts that comprise much of Untrue. But here, the art with which its central sample is sliced isn't the focal point, unlike the refrains one might relish in "Archangel" and "Near Dark"; each female vocal sample is instead hovering, drifting, and then dissolving before coming back again. The track doesn't rely on a sharp hook or firm layer of melody, opting to subsist instead on atmosphere. Through rain, jet engine bass, and a sample of shotgun shells hitting pavement that Bevan lifted from a video game, it's got a steely, self-contained energy that's worrisome to a point: You feel like you're wandering through spaces on which you've no hope of shedding any light at all.

__James Blake

__"I Only Know (What I Know Now)"

On his most recent EP, Klavierwerke, Blake opted to abandon the R&B samples, favoring snippets of his own voice instead. "I Only Know (What I Know Now)" is the most haunting evidence thereof, Blake creating an owl-like echo effect that stretches from one end of the track to the other. And despite the chilly piano tones that Blake periodically dips into the mix, the recording has an unusual warmth to it. But what's even more interesting is the lack of limits: Blake's a composer at heart, and he's created a vocal fractal here that sounds like infinity trapped inside of five minutes. Each layer interacts with the one that precedes it.

__Mount Kimbie

__"Maybes"

Mount Kimbie is the London-based duo of Kai Campos and Dom Maker. The titular track from their debut EP, "Maybes" takes what sounds like a Karin Dreijer Andersson vocal sample and coils it to heady effect. Together, over somnambulant guitar chords and shuddering bass, they pinch and release the vocal so that at times, it sounds as though it's wrapped around the track's rhythms in another song altogether. Almost as though everything here but the vocal was sent through a delay pedal.

__Balam Acab

__"See Birds (Moon)"

Alec Koone is a 19-year-old music student who creates psychedelic, sometimes oppressive drone as Balam Acab. Also squeezed liberally into Koone's mix is a healthy dose of ghostly echo and found samples like the ones that populate the down-tempo, bomb-shelter bass tones of "See Birds (Moon)". While Koone's music is often mentioned in the same breath as drag/witch-house artists, Burial's handiwork can be found all over the place here, namely in the form of barely there vocals that seem to be moaning at one another, running like liquid down the various surfaces Koone sets up throughout.

__How to Dress Well

__"Ready for the World"

Few recordings since Untrue have come so close to developing such an ambient self-awareness as Tom Krell's lo-fi R&B project How to Dress Well. Krell is a philosophy student who, after splitting time between Brooklyn and Cologne, Germany, now lives in Chicago, having released a steady stream of recordings online over the past year or so. The songs themselves don't boast the same thick shadows as Burial's do, but Krell's not creating club music so much as slow jams for the attic. "Ready for the World" is a stunner, a lonesome, kick-drummed track that showcases his shower falsetto, hilly phrasings, and the distorted breath of one other voice: an anonymous Ah-Ah-Ah vocal that pulses end to end, suspended in the same air it shares with Krell's.

__Bon Iver

__"Woods"

Krell's work brings to mind the soul singing of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon in a few ways, not just in the ragged nature of his falsetto, but the way he's unafraid to pair it with the processed. In addition to his choir-inspired vocal layering, Vernon's first Bon Iver recordings tended to sound like something between a eulogy and a paean to loneliness. That's one of the reasons why the processed layers of "Woods", from the 2009 Blood Bank EP, was so striking: Vernon seems disconnected from everything, like he's actually watching every ribbon of vocal scrape the ceiling of the Wisconsin cabin that helped birth the whole thing, as if his voice has actually left his body behind for five minutes. Since Blood Bank, "Woods" has developed a weird life of its own, turning up with added instrumentation as "Still" on Volcano Choir's Unmap, and then being used as the melodic basis for Kanye West's "Lost in the World". And the extended coda of "Runaway", another track from Kanye's forthcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, makes poignant use of a similar kind of layered processing.

__Four Tet

__"Love Cry"

Kieran Hebden/Four Tet was also a former classmate of William Bevan, aka Burial, at the Elliot School in southwest London. Though the two collaborated on a split 12" early last year, it's the shades of Untrue prevalent in Four Tet's "Love Cry" that best reflect the effect that meeting had on Hebden. Smack dab in the middle of the track, a female vocal splinters into fragments and then folds over and over again-- a kind of central, melodic thesis. It's nine minutes long and percussive to deadly lengths, but with the help of that vocal, "Love Cry" finds this really beautiful middle ground between the mechanized and human. It's an anonymous element, yet it lends everything around it a uniquely expressive quality.

__Forest Swords

"Rattling Cage"

__

Forest Swords is Matthew Barnes, a native of the Wirral peninsula in northern England. He too, like James Blake and Burial before him, has found much to mine in the music of Aaliyah, having covered "If Your Girl Only Knew" in 2009. But Barnes' vision distinguishes itself differently: Though songs like "Rattling Cage" integrate sampled and clipped vocal phrasings, they're punctuated most notably by how Barnes stabs holes in them with guitar. "Rattling Cage", from a 7" released earlier this year, is a psychedelic haiku sketched out with that template in mind. Snaked between shards of guitar is a vocal sample that's as charred as it is haunting.

__Pariah

__"Railroad"

London's Arthur Cayzer records as Pariah, his relatively thin catalogue openly indebted to the vocal-centric work of Blake and Burial but much more inclined to unfurl loads more dance signifiers, acid house and bass among them. In that regard, tracks like "Railroad" allow each rhythm to share a spotlight with the phantom vocal melody that tumbles throughout. And Cayzer is able to crowd the track not just with clippings of street echoes, but a swirl of vocal samples that tend to interact with one another and the pulse. Sometimes they're rendered robotic, other times they seem perfectly untouched and humanoid.

__Teengirl Fantasy

__"Cheaters"

You'd find a similarly compelling parallel in the haze of Teengirl Fantasy's "Cheaters", the duo of Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi breathing new life into a vocal sample from 70s disco-funk group Love Committee and giving it a dreamier, updated framework. Depending on how much Takahashi and Weiss tweak the volume, soften the synths, or let the sample bounce into itself, it's a more alive and less disfigured source of vocal melody than what's been mentioned up until now. But as a wormhole between decades, it's fantastically disorienting.

__Blue Daisy [ft. LaNote]

__"Space Ex"

"Space Ex" takes the faded vocals of French singer LaNote and fans them out over robotized glitch-hop beats. At times, it's a light counterpoint to the round, semi-bulbous throb of bass that spurs the track along. But the Camden-based Blue Daisy showcases a breathtaking economy of space, creating tiny pockets in which synths and rhythms can be stowed and through which that vocal track can bleed. It's got half a brain attached to that increasingly crowded edge of post-dubstep, but its other half is headed somewhere totally different. Where that is exactly and what it might be called isn't entirely clear, but that's part of the appeal.

__Pictureplane

__"Flashion (You Designed My Mind)"

Denver's Travis Egedy crafts electronic pop music of a much more ramshackle, trance-y nature. In 2007, around the time of Untrue, Egedy put out a track entitled "Flashion (You Designed My Mind)". It's a soup of crude synths and chipmunk treatments with a head-less vocal hook peeking its way out just often enough to keep the song afloat. His project has gone on to refine that approach even further, dropping a full-length last fall that bubbles over with screechy, sample-welding that's equally persistent.

Kingdom

"Fogs"

Kingdom is Ezra Rubin, a Brooklyn DJ who has an ear for grand gestures and vintage R&B. Here, Rubin doesn't travel too far back in time to find his muse. Amid a battery of synth riffs, "Fogs" shakes up a vocal sample from none other than Ms. Beyoncé Knowles. It's a wild-haired, extroverted track whose mix isn't murky in the slightest. And though it's hollowed out and almost siren-like at times, Rubin gives Beyoncé's vocal the full diva treatment by offering it a limelight just as bright as his beat. She's not whispering, she's not purring-- she's belting.