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Lorenzo Gomez Oviedo—Una pluma en el oleaje

Bruma del sur, May 2020

Lorenzo Gomez Oviedo—Una pluma en el oleaje

June 9, 2020

Una pluma en el oleaje is a spacious and organic EP from Lorenzo Gomez Oviedo. Incorporating field recordings of the creaking flora of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, this work displays a brittle nativity. It’s both as tough and as fragile as bark.

The EP opens with a percussive flutter—something like bat’s wings, or rocks skipping down a slope—which suggests descent from a great altitude. We then breach the canopy, and plunge into thick ambience. In its opening moments, Una pluma… bears comparison to new age veterans like Terry Riley—but that’s not to say it’s dinner party music for hippies. Oviedo grasps for divinity. He fully explores inner and outer worlds, and dodges the self-care soundtracking that new age can sometimes settle for.

Song titles are mysterious triptychs which glue natural and unnatural elements. As well as describing mediums used for the pieces, they provide an evocation of mood. There is a calculated mystery to Una pluma… which provokes consideration of some great unknown.

Pieces incrementally lengthen in a slowing cycle of breath. Structurally, Una pluma… is a hypnagogic lure; a well which yawns to suck the listener in. ‘Huida, temblores, silencio’, the EP’s second track, boasts a tanpura drone that batters you into a trance (used to similarly dazzling effect in Kelly Lee Owens’ ‘8’). The experience of Una pluma… is, then, a sinking sleep—a cosy darkness that stretches further ahead with your every step.

‘Plástico, niebla, hojas’ wakes things up again, and is the most melodic piece on here. It’s a joyous and revelatory closer, one which feels like an unveiling. But with its truth, revealed at the heart of the forest, comes something discordant and frightening. There's overpowering sublimity, and chords which melt into each other’s space creating atonality. A forest of sound, its many voices sing in complex harmony. With Una pluma…, Oviedo snares us from our perch on the mesa into haunted forests, shows us the leaf-littered floor, and lets us reascend afterwards.

Una pluma en el oleaje is available for streaming and free download here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

In Review Tags Ambient, Field Recording
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Laurel Halo—Possessed

The Vinyl Factory, Apr. 2020

Laurel Halo—Possessed

June 6, 2020

Metahaven’s 2018 documentary Possessed summarised the first steps of our messy divorce from technology. The internet age promised a joyful future delivered by instant, uncensored global communication. But the web has instead tangled us. It's bought itself out, reduced humans to commodities, been hijacked to sow profound worldwide division. Its chatter has become as deafening as it has meaningless. We are reliving the 1970s, a perverse rotting of the previous decade’s utopian values. With Possessed, Laurel Halo provides the soundtrack to this disintegrating future.

Possessed is at its most striking when noisiest. ‘Zeljava’, a lead-heavy and costive mid-point track, lingers long after it’s finished. But even the soundtrack's gentler passages—with Halo stepping back to make space for Metahaven’s visuals—make a very strong impression. Contrasts between the soundtrack’s two extremes are abrupt and jarring. Themes are introduced as flippantly as they are chucked away, and instrumentation is unswervingly eclectic. Possessed is a picture of chaos. A whole comprised of mismatched, conflicting pieces.

If one thing unifies Halo's material here, it’s panic. No matter the form, the content is fear. The solo piano of ‘Rome Theme III’ is a good example; bare and baroque when compared to its electronic peers, but no less defamiliarising. The piece stops and starts in staccato half-phrases—it’s like an animal limping from its predator, sustained by will alone, seconds from collapse. Conversely, ‘Breath’ is an amelodic and ambient piece—but it feels like Angelo Badalamenti soundtracking Hell. One of the few reprieves is ‘Stabat Mater (Except)’. This piano arrangement of a 18th century Pergolesi theme acts in delicate counterpoint to the chaos around it.

It’s remarkable how broad Laurel Halo goes on Possessed; how many tones and techniques she touches on. This soundtrack is ultimately so wild and diverse it feels exhausting. But its dense fury does provide a catharsis, and a comforting sense that we’re all as confused as each other.

 

Possessed is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

In Review Tags Soundtrack, Noise, Sound Collage
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Machinefabriek with Anne Bakker—Oehoe

Where To Now?, Jun 2020

Machinefabriek with Anne Bakker - Oehoe

June 4, 2020

Oehoe is the result of a collaboration between electronic act Machinefabriek (Rutger Zuydervelt) and violin/viola player Anne Bakker. Sitting somewhere between melody and drone, Oehoe blends its numerous individual sound sources into an intimate collage. Bakker has already recorded in a similar style—entwining her vocals and instrumentation together with EP Vox/Voila—but Zuydervelt’s contribution on Oehoe is to push things much farther leftfield, and provide a great deal of sonic intricacy and experimentation.

This intricacy isn’t obvious straight away. Elements are disguised within one another, and the sheer craft of Oehoe only reveals itself when you consciously seek it. Composition and instrumental voicing have a comforting traditionalism—but, to find it, you must blindly stumble through a mix of obfuscated, elongated and inverted natural sounds. Zuydervelt raises thick fog of modernity; a sort of urgent ambience. Bakker shatters through with strains and squeals that possess a wonderful, tense fragility. It feels as though the strings of her viola—or throat—may snap at any second.

It’s an elegant dance of two very different styles, but these two performers remain in service to one another’s work throughout Oehoe. As with any good collaboration, it’s impossible to pinpoint where either’s influence begins or ends. It’s a case of one aim being sought from several radically different, yet complementary, starting points.

Oehoe straddles many years and regions of musical tradition, flitting between touchstones of Swedish folk, modern classical, concrète and noise. It’s unique and brutal work, like half-disintegrated sheet music exhumed from an archaeological dig and digitally reassembled by an AI.

Both Bakker and Zuydervelt rile against the sterile clarity which normally surrounds chamber music. The duo finds truth in scuffiness. That truth: what we actually hear when a tone is produced is a scream, the scream of bow and string slowly shredding each other to pieces. It’s the same sort of cool cacophony as Björk’s Utopia, which made liberal use of the screeching of tropical birds. Oehoe more clearly states its aims though, with neither the ego nor eye-watering budget to follow its artists’ every grandiose impulse. While musically, it may bear superficial resemblance to Björk’s latest, it has the spirit of her earlier (better) work; smudging the line between play and stern efficiency so well you forget such a thing exists.

Oehoe is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

In Review Tags Experimental, Drone, Musique concrète
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INTERVIEW: Choir Boy

“I'm focused on figuring out what makes living worthwhile.”

INTERVIEW: Choir Boy

June 1, 2020

Choir Boy’s latest, Gathering Swans, is an arch but deeply emotional album. It encompasses love’s blooming, it’s failure, and all that lays between.

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In Interview
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Choir Boy—Gathering Swans

Dias Records, May 2020

Choir Boy—Gathering Swans

June 1, 2020

Choir Boy are one of a number of eclectic Salt Lake City bands now graduating to unprecedented worldwide recognition and acclaim. The city has been a quiet cultural hotspot for ages, but was recently discovered as the site of a post-punk renaissance. Choir Boy are one of the softest of these in sound, but still have enough prickly spirit to rival any of their peers. More mawkish elements slip the net because they feel sardonic—exposing the emotional vacuum at the nexus of modern yuppie indie shite not by violent opposition, but wry homage.

Nowhere is this more cogently deployed than in lead single ‘Complainer’; a ballad that’s effusive with defeatism and self-pity, and riffs on a Morrissey-like “dearie me” persona even more aggressively than Morrissey does (and it helps that vocalist Adam Klopp has some of the nicest pipes in the business). But the comparison doesn’t end there, courtesy of the same buoyant instrumentation and world-class performances which made the Smiths such a listenable band. It’s impeccably constructed, beautifully assembled and mixed, but at no point feels insincere or too performative or “clean”.

A delicate, tragi-comic balance is struck; a Twin Peaks-ian tone of melodrama we cannot avoid becoming swept up in. Gathering Swans is frequently funny, but never a joke. And it can switch things up into paroxysmal sadness and beauty at a moment’s notice. This band do heaps with the smallest movements. Lyrical themes are fully-developed, but are explored with such a delicate touch it feels crass to even bring them up; like whispering art history in someone’s ear in the Rothko chapel.

The mark of a great synth pop act is that they make now decades-old techniques feel refreshed or unprecedented. With Gathering Swans, Choir Boy manage just that—beneath a cosy synth blanket is something ineffable that makes you want to recommend them to everyone you know. There is a unique sense of mystery to this band—a feeling that something profound is being withheld or concealed, and that if you listen hard enough, the curtain will fall away. Until then, it’s a really lovely curtain.

Gathering Swans is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

In Review Tags Synth pop, Dream-pop
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