Monday 12 September 2011

Ostracon - Unauthorized Modifications

Right then, something a tad different today as we venture into the realms of downtempo/chill-out/ambient music. I don't claim to be any expert in such fields but I do quite like this album and I rather rashly promised I'd review it, so I'll try to do it justice!

I guess as good a place to start as any is the fact that all of its six tracks are called things like Particle Agent, Dwarf Plutocracy and Photon Coercion… though that might lead you to expect weirdy techno à la Planet Mu/Warp/Peacefrog etc, which this isn't. Instead, the influence of the likes of The Orb and System 7 is writ large in this album's grooves… but I'd say it owes as much in other places to the space rock of Hawkwind and Gong, the free jazz experiments of Caravan, the avant-garde soundscapes of Harold Budd, Philip Glass etc and the synthtronic soundtrack adventures of John Carpenter. All of whom, it may surprise you to learn, do grace my record collection to some extent or other*.

Or to put it another way… hear this at a festival, and you can pretty much guarantee there'll be a stall selling chai nearby, and probably some sort of 'sonic art installation'. In fact it sounds a bit like a sonic art installation itself at times… just one that for once isn't, y'know, rubbish.

Definitely a good bet for those of you who like to sit up late smoking funny cigarettes, then.

Out: Now

About: This is brought to you by Unearthed Music, a Minneapolis based label dedicated to 'organic electronic music'. Find 'em online
here
(website) or on Facebook.

*especially Hawkwind but we needn't delve too deeply into my cupboard full of dodgy hippy skeletons, need we?

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