Artist: Oozertz
Title: Sick notes From The Real World
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Echoic Murk Records
Lets take a moment for musing shall we as this might be a bit of a strange place to land in for this blog.
I was 11 or 12 when in a school ‘music’ lesson (ie. no actual practical music at all…) the teacher asked us for a definition of music. After a few suggestions I offered ‘a sound deliberately created to be listened to’. I think the only reason the teacher liked it was it left a lot of room for the discussion that followed. I seem to recall that someone asked if that meant a fire alarm was music. Can’t remember the response to be honest but it was a good follow up question for sure.
What would I answer now? No, probably. I think somewhere a phrase like ‘having no initial purpose other than to be listened to, not acted upon.’ But I can already see the trucks lined up to drive through the holes in that one…
But it brings me to experimental music. Noise. Electronic, field recordings and manipulations outside of musical scales and notes. I think I first realised there was something to this unbelievably vast arena was chance meetings with C.C.C.C. , Masonna and and Merzbow in particular. I have never been heavily into it but it’s always there, like the shapeless primordial soup from which dark ambient emerged. And something always grabs me.
So here we are. Sixty minutes of industrial noise with strange veins of dark ambient.
No this isn’t a track by track examination. You can breathe easily.
From the distortion, interference wall of white noise of ‘A Warm Welcome From Us’ to the closing eerie crawling and echoing ambient of ‘AWCA’ this is a captivating soundscape for me. This is not some violent, aggressive shit-stirring confrontational posture. Loud at times yes as the buzzing and pulsing noise between the stations infiltrates this world begins to block out all else, but throughout there is a building sense of, well, liminal spaces. If you’ve had the fortune/misfortune to sit through the full length of the abstract horror film Skinamarink you might find the same yawning otherness opening for you here except I find none of this malevolent somehow. Disturbing, weird, intruding yes but it is like listening to the thoughts and souls of empty and derelict buildings gather around you. The ghost of a post industrial landscape described in hiss and buzz and sudden bursts of noise. The danger is only the by product of these places, not the places themselves. They harbour no intent at all, simply a slow, harsh decay.
There are films and games who could use this beyond a doubt but this doesn’t feel like a soundtrack or a background noise for other events. This is the event, this is the place and the time. The longer you exist within it the more it feels as though you are passing into something. When I was young I used to think of the word, made up or otherwise I have never investigated, hyper-reality. Things that open themselves in such detail that they cease to make conventional sense. The Dancing Wu Li Masters…..
This is both the strength and weakness of such music. The composers will have a real idea of what they are expressing, what they have created, and yet its interaction with the unknown, the listener, can produce a world never intended.
I feel and hear the derelict spaces rubbing so real and so hard up against the construct of reality that it wears thin and something other begins to seep through. This is ugly and beautiful and to me completely absorbing.
If you want to try and step a little further into the abstract from dark ambient this is truly an excellent place to start.
Gizmo
Sick notes from the real world | OOZERTZ | oozertz.
OOZERTZ – ‘Sick Notes From The Real World’ | OOZERTZ | Echoic Murk Records
