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There’s an old crackly rustic feeling about the debut album for 22 year old Helsinki artist Ous Mal, a feeling that belies his age. It’s the kind of sound that conveys a deep sense of warmth, despite the occasional lo fi noise debris. There’s a cyclical feel to the music, a gentle almost ambient mix of samples, some of which you’d have to assume come from a dusty record collection, combined with regular live instrumentation. Not unlike Philip Jeck, these gorgeous swells of melancholic melody feel locked between grooves, repetitive, almost like a record skipping. There’s also some heavy electro acoustic manipulation going on too. Pitch and tempo are fiddled with, unidentified sweeps of sounds bob up, twist, thicken and evaporate all within this somewhat sweet somewhat complex logic where the music, this large textural swell, somehow conjures up these curious feelings of nostalgia. And that’s probably the key here, the way that Ous Mal is able to combine this emotional resonance with a real experimental technique, as the structures here don’t feel like composed structures, rather the music feels like a large complex messy living and breathing organism.
Bob Baker Fish
