oMMM – Re-Animator Vol. 1

Exotic Pylon

One year, for Christmas, due to extreme poverty, I had no choice but to make all my Christmas presents. I had finally got my hands on some rudimentary recording equipment, and set about making my friends homemade, heartfelt, brutal noise recordings. I made a CD-R of close-mic’ed electric tea kettle recordings: 12 minutes of churning ferric cacophony. When asked, my friend replied: “Yeah, it’s good, but it’s not really the kind of thing I LISTEN to.”

With Re-Animator Vol. 1, the question lingers: do you like to listen to machines? Edmund Davie takes the listener on a guided tour of three decades of underground electronic sounds, as filtered through an introverted, nocturnal lens. These are the sounds of a lone soul, caressing the oscillators at 3am. He is the sole proponent of a style he’s calling Bedcore, which is “what happens when acid house can’t be arsed to get up in the morning. Or evening. When it does, it generally moves around in a decrepit fashion.”

This is zombie techno, then, or shambolic breakbeat.

This is how Daniel Baker, from Ship Canal, described Re-Animator, Vol. 1, in the liner notes:

“Its basically Scum for the permo-daylight-denied-bedroom-ridden-by-choice-bloc. Tin foil hats, Paul Nichols going bastshit, King Jammy groping into a decaying sack full of scratched to fuck PS1 discs and gouging out one-riddim clumps of flesh pockmarked with Tesco Value nanobots and doing a proper Denis Nielsen on the remains over 24 micro-blurts that perfectly encapsulate the sheer hate-inducing pointlessness of life on the margins of a culture mired in dissociation and poverty porn. This might have been bracketed as industrial, once upon a time. And it does riff on some of the most self-consciously ostracised and singularly hermetic broadcasts from the post-TG cassette underground. But its quite probably had a fair bit more mundane sex than those folks. Not that it never thought about ball gags and glory holes… I mean, the whole beautiful buzz, hiss and trickle that cakes every pore of this lolloping, bus stop desecrating noise is clearly a massive pervert… but oMMM isn’t into any of that circus act shit.”

All this talk of revenants and Throbbing Gristle should let you know what yr in for: 24 tracks of ferric abstraction, unrestricted by popular taste, pop conventions, or the need to succeed. Dare I say, this record is PURE? Pure craft, pure exploration, pure science, pure gnosis. There may be moments of air-raid sirens and blitzkrieg white noise, but another shitty noise record, this is not. Davie may be free from the Platonic Cave of genre identification, but the fact remains: THIS IS GOOD MUSIC. Rhythmic work-outs, sci-fi sound collage, oMMM seeks to master every craft, to make a new, blatant noise; something free and inspired.

Edmund Davie has found a spiritual home on Jonny Mugwump‘s Exotic Pylon Records, whose only mission statement is:

Exotic Pylon:
A community of those who have nothing in common
A broadcast in physical form
Irresponsible belief and celebration of the parallel real
Nomadic aesthetics
Fuck your cool / Fuck your emotional prisons

oMMM isn’t doing this to be cool, and may be the coolest thing imaginable, in the process. People who have been way into Hospital Productions’ recent output, or any of the industrialized techno that’s been greasing up the dancefloors these last 18 months, will find a boon companion in this record, to ease the loneliness in the middle of the night.

So I’ll play it for you straight: oMMM make quality electronic music. The beats are tight, taut and focused, while the noise barrage is thought-erasing, but never harsh. Things are lovingly mixed and arranged, making this a really engaging headphone pilgrimage you can take again and again. OMMM is making dubstep dirty and dangerous again, making bedroom electro r’n’b for the socially hopeless.

Re-Animator Vol. 1 is the first volume in a series of three. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next. If yr looking for the ‘hits’ check out “Into Outer Space With Professor Rhythm” or “Drunk On Doom And Industrial Noise” to catch a glimpse of oMMM’s cybernetic Utopia.

-J Simpson-