Now we did cover the news of this album by this latest Osmium a few weeks back, the whole thing has been kicking around here waiting for attention for a little bit now, here’s for the sake of clarity or repetition or whatever the price of fish or teabags or the heaviest of metals is today is the original piece repeated with the whole album explored at the foot of it all…

Today, experimental supergroup Osmium have shared details of their eagerly awaited (so it says here) debut self-titled album. “Osmium” is out 20th June via Geoff Barrow’s Invada Records and is announced alongside a new single titled “Osmium 1”. Yet another band called Osmium, the heaviest metal of course, we’ve lost count of how many Osmiums have risen up and demanded we think for ourselves by now, hell, I even did the artwork for one of them back there, I probably like this Osmium’s cover a lor more. Here’s a first taste of this particular Osmium…

Here’s the press release, yeah, I know, lazy, there are places to be, paint to throw…

“Having previously debuted their material live at Unsound, the group is made up of the Oscar-winning Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, who has recorded with the likes of Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle and Múm, as well as performing live with Sunn O))) and Fennesz. She has composed the scores for, among others, “Chernobyl” and “Tár”, to much critical acclaim. She’s joined in Osmium by Emptyset and Subtext engineer and producer James Ginzburg, Senyawa’s idiosyncratic vocalist Rully Shabara and the Grammy-winning sound designer / producer Sam Slater.

Alloying burnished electroacoustic soundscapes with dense, metallic drones, barbed rhythms and buckled, bio-mechanical vocalizations, Osmium’s debut album doesn’t try to cast a rigid future. Rather, it tempers a viscous flow of unorthodox speculations that smolders through the distant past, blazing a trail all the way to the frontier of fate. Absorbed by questions about the relationship between humans and technology, tradition and progression, the individual and the group, OSMIUM channel their experience and expertise into a set of forward-thinking sonic interrogations that skewer established cultural preconceptions. And although genre is acknowledged – the album draws from folk, doom metal, 20th century minimalism, industrial music and extreme noise – there’s never a sense that it’s riveted firmly in place.

While each member brings along a laundry list of accolades, the project is far greater than the sum of its parts. Widely known for her aforementioned soundtrack work and run of acclaimed solo albums on Touch, Guðnadóttir plays the halldorophone, a unique cello-like electroacoustic instrument designed by Halldór Úlfarsson that allows the performer to harness unstable feedback loops. Taking his cues from this process, Sam Slater – who’s worked alongside Jóhann Jóhannsson, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Ben Frost and others – generates rhythms using a self-oscillating drum he custom designed with KOMA Elektronik, and Subtext boss and Emptyset member Ginzburg responds in kind, producing booming tambura-like sonorities from a device he developed himself based on the monocord, an ancient single-stringed resonator.

Osmium synchronize the three unique instruments using a custom system of robotics to generate basic rhythms that underpin their improvisations and experiments, and although Shabara just uses his voice, it’s his alien tones that supply the band with their conceptual fulcrum. The vocalist is one of South Asia’s most recognizable underground artists, and the sounds he’s able to create using exhaustively rehearsed extended techniques are so distinctive that he’s been studied by scientists back home in Indonesia. As part of OSMIUM, Shabara attempts to merge with the band’s machines, warping his vocal cords to mimic the robotics and originate hoarse percussive cracks and eldritch tonalities.

The first taste of this comes in the form of “Osmium 1”, which sees Shabara’s primordial growls, harsh breathing, and pre-lingual utterances sputter out across vicious distortion, kinetic industrial drones, and metallic, percussive noise. The track builds and escalates around Shabara’s cybernetic, shamanic outbursts, which twist and overwhelm the charging instrumentation before everything breaks down into a slower and more ominous final section.

Speaking on the single Sam Slater, says “When we recorded this track, Rully was completely in a trance — he went somewhere and then came back. Likewise when we play this track live, every time I look up from the drums I see the audience totally locked in to Rully, pushed and pulled by the waves and intensity.”

Never weighed down by needless sound design or modish ornamentation, it’s music that feels authentically experimental; OSMIUM have figured out an awkward symmetry between their discrete approaches, concentrating their gaze on the outcome rather than the process. The result is a work of science fiction that’s driven by interaction, conversation and sensation.

“Osmium” is out 20th June via Invada Records – Links / Bandcamp

And here we are, now almost at the end of May and with the entire album and a need to deal with it and review it before it becomes too familiar

Osmium – Osmium (Invada) – You have the who and the where and the details up there, the supergroup bit and who they all are so let’s throw all that away and just react to the album itself, to the music they’ve made, let us let the art itself do the talking. Seven pieces, the longest is eight minutes long, the shortest not quite a minute and a half, all of it rather intense, it kind of sounds like something birthed in Berlin. It does sound industrial, not the cliched version of industrial, not a bunch of black-clad goths hitting machines, this is something far deeper than that, these are the sounds of industry or machines or machines as ritual. their pieces of art move in a mechanical way, it a ritualistic almost tribal way, a dark way, if these are words rather than human sounds, then they are kind of lost in the depth of it all. It isn’t aggressive music, it doesn’t confront, it draws you in, plays with you, envelops you, wraps you up if you let it, if you want it to, it does feel that you have to want it to take you with it. The pieces do rather make one whole, this does feel like one whole thing, a series of pieces making up one work, it is all on the same level, it does, in the most positive of ways, feel like all the same all the way through; the same pace (or at least a pace that changes without being too dramatic about it, without you really being that aware of the change), the same textures, the same colours, the same ritual, subtle evolutions, details enhancing it all. Now I really should go back and re-read the press release but then I really don’t want to. I want to mention Rothko, although being with his paintings calms and this really doesn’t; this is reassuring, inviting, it feels like a good place to be, it isn’t a calm place though, it feels a little claustrophobic right now, you kind of need to trust them and where they’re taking you, to submit to it, to them. The album does feel like a ritual, it feels big, it feels cavernous,  (it kind of feels like Ron Athey did a couple of months back in the basement of the Tate). 

And then you clue in to the fact that seven pieces do have their own personalities, then you start to think about maybe hanging the show differently just to see what it would sound like, changing the order of the seven paintings, walk around it in a different way, and no, surely the seventh track needs to come seventh as you start to wonder if you were wise to submit to it all. And then there’s the silence at the end, that silence at the end is (very) important. The whole album feels important, not self important, just important. Important art, a piece of work to enjoy, to explore, to be with, to maybe feel a little uncomfortable with, enclosed by, to feel very comfortable with… (sw)