OPM: Music Is an Adventure

Camilo Bravo – Volatil

This album is deep – a varied, vibrant and multi-hued mixture of different styles and musical textures. Jazz, folk, prog, classic rock, traditional dance musics and touches of the blues cavort together in an unbounded stew of influences and ideas. If that’s not enough to hook you, they invited their goth, metal and pop pals to drop in here and there as well. 

Skillfully concocted out of a mix of acoustic, electric and synthetic elements, there are no seams to be found here – everything works well and fits together beautifully, despite the wild and wide-open aesthetic. Most of these tracks are quite short, and tho I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I (for one) would love to hear a few of them jammed out into 15-minute psychedelic freakouts.

(Listened to tracks 2, 4, 5, 10, 13, 16)

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Jesse Spillane – Their Earlier Stuff Was Better

Smart, playful and fun, these dozen-plus tracks are love letters to music itself. Rooted in jazz fusion, but wandering where they will, each of these short tunes manages to pack in a lot of ideas and sounds without ever feeling overstuffed or aimless. 

The artist calls it an “everything is a B-side” aesthetic, and that makes sense – these tracks are much like the ones that used to adorn the flip side of single releases in their exploratory and carefree “anything goes” approach. With bits that seem to reference everything from classical music to Beck, Mr. Bungle and jam bands, this is clearly the output of a restless and omnivorous musical mind.

(Listened to tracks 2, 4, 9, 13)

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Logickal – Amulet

Kicking off with two tracks of dark, heavy, experimental techno with industrial and IDM influences, Amulet stakes out its territory with ruthless precision. These tunes bang like classic techno – hard, fast and heavy on the drums – but have a little too much rhythmic complexity and sonic weirdness to qualify as straight up techno. Not to say you couldn’t dance to them, but it would be an adventurous DJ that would introduce those rhythms to their set. 

The third and final track is a slowly evolving piece of minimal, dark ambient. All slow filter sweeps and tiny, almost imperceptible movements, it’s a marked contrast to the heavy, aggressive energy of the first two tracks, while clearly being rooted in a similar aesthetic approach. 

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Armageddon Speaking – “Birds and Fries the Whole World Dies”

The title might suggest something heavy and dark but this is actually a pleasant ride thru smeary ambient and mellow kosmische. Opening on waves of pretty, shifting synth sounds, it’s about a minute and a half before a simple beat comes in, and that carries us through most of the rest of the track. 

Field recordings of bird song and human voices just at the threshold of comprehension pop in from time to time to vary things up, but the real magic is served by the overlapping layers of synth arpeggios and pads that come and go throughout, keeping things texturally varied even as the basic structure holds steady.

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german mix – “You Don’t Have to Be Sorry”

Strap in for four minutes of horrorcore EBM spiked with samples from Aliens. The beat and bassline is deeply indebted to old-school industrial – falling somewhere between slowed down My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and various Belgian acts of a similar age. 

That’s orchestrated with some truly uncanny sound design – weird frequencies and borderline unpleasant timbres do a great job of creating an unsettling vibe. This is all heavily compressed until it slaps you in the face, and then those Aliens samples tie it all together and cement the horror-film energy.