Thursday 23 September 2010

Ourobonic Plague - Retro-Active Enchantments

Ourobonic Plague is a one man band from Perth, Australia.  Its not easy to reduce the music he makes down to an easy soundbite, but if it were released on Cold Spring, which it is of a quality that has the potential for it, then it would probably get tagged Dark Ambient; it incorporates a range of emotionally wrought sounds derived from the bleaker scales of dub, drone, and doom combining those base elements with swathes of decaying synths to create an initially jarring, but ultimately uplifting atmosphere - a fusion of Lustmord and Fennesz, coupling cold grey textures with a depth of affecting tone.

Retro-Active Enchantments is an album that collects and reconfigures tracks that have been previously posted on the website since the band began in 2007 into a coherent whole.  It's the kind of sound that hits you as almost too bleak and harsh at first, but the desolation quickly recedes as you become accustomed to the sonic environment, like walking into a darkened room, the detailed nuances begin to reveal themselves.  The opening Leak coils tendrils of steady fuzz around itself, like a mobeious strip of flickering static; Reverse is similarly themed and equally as effective, controlling it's eldritch demonics into a listenable narrative that swallows up the light arond the speakers. Following Reverse is the industrial piston beat of Process,a suitably monumental closing track that is sinisterly paced, it's echoing martial stomp giving layers of futuristic urban white noise space to move around and populate the suspense in between the drops.

The album is streamable on Soundloud or available in a limited run of 33 DVD cased CDrs - so get in there quick.

There is a MySpace, but he'd much rather you used his Theosophical Nightmares Wordpress



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