There’s humour in Melbourne musician Bono Ono’s music. It’s not just in his absurd moniker, nor is necessarily just in his album and track titles, as there’s a kind of playfulness, a loose feeling of experimentation coursing through 13 Step Program’s circuits. It’s also clear that this is electronic music created using hardware, whether it’s synths, drum machines or bizarre electronic boxes, as there is texture in the sounds, also a vague feeling that Bono Ono is only just able to corral them, that they’re in danger of exploding and veering out of control. This comes across mostly in the dub effects to his electro ditties, where feedback and delay coalesce into a kind of feverish madness. The first piece ‘Fierce Realness’ is an exercise in repetition, a melodic electro bass riff endlessly bludgeoning us over and over as the other synths basically freak out and threaten to tear themselves apart above.
As the album progresses, it quickly becomes clear that Bono Ono is interested in the riff’s ability to stand up to pressure, building and tearing apart whole worlds around the repetition. ‘Random Slacks’ is his sub base acid moment that he builds slowly before daring to mess with the bass – the spine of the track. It’s a bold move, yet despite initially being disconcerting, the coherence comes in the additional layers he adds, and there’s something liberating about undermining one of the pillars of the songs structure.
There’s no doubt Bono Ono loves noise. He loves synthetic sounds under pressure, yet he also loves melodies, and his efforts to combine these two disparate worlds is fascinating. Particularly when you consider the curious textures he evokes. There’s a real looseness to 13 Step Program. A certain freeform exuberance. You can tell Bono Ono hasn’t laboured endlessly over the mouse with these tunes and to be honest it’s this loose cavalier attitude that is the strength of 13 Step Program.
