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LIMITED EDITION TRANSPARENT RED VINYL LP, HOUSED IN A 350GSM GLOSS FINISHED OUTER SLEEVE WITH BLACK POLYLINED INNER BAG & DOWNLOAD CODE
ORDER NOW VIA THE LABEL WEBSHOP OR BANDCAMP SITE
LP Tracklisting
A1. Lifeship (4:50)
A2. Saturn (12:47)
B1. Nuclear Fuel (11:06)
B2. Slide (3:41)
B3. Centuries (6:21)
Formed from the ashes of Drunk In Hell and
Blown Out, OZO are a blazing improvised alto sax free jazz rock trio
made up from Graham Thompson (Ballpeen), Karl D Silva (Drunk In Hell)
and Mike Vest. (Drunk In Hell, BONG, 11Paranoias, Melting Hand)
For fans of Pharaoh Sanders, John and
Alice Coltrane. Improvised and experimental alto sax workouts, lead
drums, fluid thunder bass and freak out guitar melodies. OZO Saturn is
5 tracks of black impulse meets harmonic stooges.
MIKE VEST TALKING ABOUT OZO
“I’ve been waiting to start a band
with Graham Thompson and Karl D Silva. Karl used to play Sax in the
Drunks (Drunk In Hell) and Graham is amazing drummer who plays in lots
of bands. He can play everything and is really great at production and
mixing. Couple of bands fell apart or just became unproductive, so I
moved on, like I did. Graham’s drum track were so good and alive
that I came up with the idea to have him leading the tracks. Added
bass line and asked Karl to blast through in one take. The results
came back and it sounded awesome. So here we are.”
REVIEWS
It seems fitting that OZO should make
their debut roughly concurrent to scientists unveiling the highest
resolution to-date images of the surface of the sun. The Newcastle
Upon Drugs — sorry, Tyne — UK, three-piece are ostensibly led by
guitarist/bassist Mike Vest, known for his drone plunge in BONG and
the spacey reach of Blown Out, among a slew of others. Joining Vest
for the five-track debut album, Saturn (on Riot Season Records), are
Ballpeen‘s Graham Thompson on drums/mixing/mastering, and alto
saxophonist Karl D’Silva (a bandmate of Vest‘s in Drunk in Hell),
and together, the trio burn through improvisational pieces of varied
tenure but largely united purpose, as though someone flipped a switch
and said, “okay, go,” and off they went. Entirely instrumental,
the record wails through most of its 38-minute run, Thompson‘s drums
not so much holding progressions to the ground as propelling them up
from the surface into the airless ether, as heard on the shorter
“Side Way,” just three-plus minutes, but a jazzy vibe that urges
listeners to pick their favorite Coltrane for a comparison (Alice!)
and roll with the heady, dug-in spirit. They are gone and gone and
gone.
Would be almost unfair to call it
self-indulgent, since that’s the idea. The exploratory go-ness of
these pieces, especially as a first offering of any sort from OZO, are
a clarion to free-fusion tweakers and anyone anywhere slightly out of
phase with their surroundings, the just-don’t-fit feel comes through
resonant through “Lifeship” at the outset and again in the
resilient echoes and avant drum expressions of closer “Centuries.”
Of course, an obvious focal point for the LP are its two broadest
jams, “Saturn” (12:47) and “Nuclear Fuel” (11:06), which
together comprise the majority of Saturn‘s runtime. While
“Lifeship” and “Slide Way” burn out cosmic and “Centuries”
harnesses an emergent wash of noise alongside its noteworthy rhythmic
freakery, it is the drift and shove of “Saturn” and the
encompassing howl of “Nuclear Fuel” that ultimately define the
album, appearing in succession as they do after “Lifeship” as
though OZO were aware of the challenge being issued to their audience
— a sort of dare-you-to-keep-up mentality that seems as much a
repellent for squares as a clarion to the lysergic converted. Come get
down, come get obliterated. Fair.
The nature of extreme music is to seek not
just a specialized listenership, but a that-much-deeper connection
therewith on account of the rareness of the bond. One suspects that
with OZO, those who can match wits with the band’s interstellar
scorch will line up to do so again and again, which is fortunate since
there’s already a second record in the works, titled Pluto. Walking
through Saturn‘s fire unscathed is no easy feat, of course, but in
addition to Vest loyalists, the jazzy appeal of these tracks should
open as many minds to what OZO are doing as it might close. One way or
the other, they’re doing it, and the resultant response feels like a
secondary consideration at best.
That is, none of this material comes
across as having been written with an audience in mind. I don’t say
that as a dig against it, since I don’t think that’s what OZO
wanted to do in the first place, and they stay true to their mission
throughout. It just means they’re working on a different level and
toward different ends. To go further, none of this material comes
across as having been “written” at all. More like it was found, or
perhaps pieced together out of elements floating in the air around the
room where the instruments were set up. The inherent value of Saturn
comes in capturing an expressive moment, the urgency of what’s being
done and the traditionalism of free jazz as a forward-reaching
reaction against form.
Vest, D’Silva and Thompson sound like
people who find the conventional boring. Maybe that’s true and maybe
it isn’t, but it’s the portrait they paint in the burning oranges
and reds and yellows of Saturn, a sense of heat duly depicted on the
album’s cover. However off-the-cuff it may be — I don’t know if
it’s entirely improvised or if there were overdubs after the fact or
what — the feeling of spontaneity in that moment is what’s most
being sought, and it’s what’s most prevalent throughout the five
pieces that comprise the album. The songs leave no room for
compromise. The commitment to outward-directed freakery is
unflinching, and for many if not most who take them on, OZO will
simply prove too much. Like a machine burning overload. That, too, is
a purposeful intent on the part of the band. They’re willful in
abandoning normality for the swirling chaos that consumes “Nuclear
Fuel” in its later reaches, and the dream-sequence distortion of
“Centuries” that wraps up is high order psychedelic noir that is
just as likely to melt minds as expand them.
Dangerous? To a point, maybe. I don’t
know if OZO are ever at risk of really falling apart here, and if they
did, it would be easy enough for it to become all part of the
non-plan, but as they move through the liquefied abrasion of
“Lifeship” into the title-track, the feeling of something unhinged
and vital is palpable. Credit for that should and must go to Thompson,
who instead of trying to harness some cohesion and structure from out
of all this churning brew becomes part of the freakery, no less
exploratory than D’Silva‘s channel-spanning horn echoes or
Vest‘s effects-laced guitar. As noted, OZO are already working on
their next full-length, which one can only imagine will continue their
through-the-temple-into-the-brain plunge, and however the two works
may ultimately relate, their debut burns with an intensity worthy of
standing alone as it inherently does in sound and style. Saturn
presents a vision of psychedelic and space rocking extremity rarely
honed to such a degree, and its vibrancy borders on blinding, which is
all the better for OZO to catch you off-guard with their next hairpin
turn. Hu-mans beware.
Ok there’s going to be two versions of
this:
Version 1:
This album is sen-fucking-sational!
Version 2:
Sometime you hear something and it’s
just what you need at the time. Coming off the back of what has seemed
like a dark winter, the shoots of spring are beginning to emerge…
renewed energy beginning to come back and more light every day.
As you may have guessed this winter has
not been the best as far as I’m concerned but I’m starting to look
forward to the future again, and this album seems to have caught my
mood perfectly.
Perhaps it’s the fact that OZO are
themselves a band that have emerged from the break up of other bands,
such as the peerless Blown Out, and Drunk in Hell. But they have
emerged in a way that I would not quite have expected.
That’s because I think its fair to say
that I didn’t expect the emergence of a free jazz space doom funk
megalith, well you wouldn’t… would you.
So while such as Blown Out was like
ramming your way through a black hole in a well travelled, yet sturdy,
freighter… this is something else altogether. Yes the bass-lines
still feel like they are made up of the very fabric of life itself,
and the guitar swoops and soars around the tracks like eddys in the
space-time continuum, but there’s something more liberating going on
here… as if a weight has been taken away and something new can be
tried.
A big part of this is the use of the sax
in this music, and that is evident from the opener ‘Lifeship’
which sets out the band’s intentions from the outset. They say that
this is for fans of Pharaoh Saunders and the Coltranes, and who could
argue with that as an aim… free and easy, but heavy as fuck!
After that ‘Saturn’ is an absolute
revelation… put together all the ingredients so far and add in a big
dose of funky danceability… man I’d like to hear this one live…
boogie on down and set your pacemakers to stun! Sensational track!
Arguably, you’re never going to follow
that… so rather than more of the same ‘Nuclear Fuel’ takes a
more studied approach…. more like the molten lava through butter
approach leaving heavy sediment in its wake. The sax seems absent but
you gradually hear it coming to the fore as if it needed to take a
break from the previous track… when it does re-emerge is seems to
transform the music again… without really changing anything.
‘Slide Way’ is so short it could be
released as a single, and has a wonderful heavy smoothness to it as if
a layer of honey was sitting on top of a tempestuous sea… yet
gradually absorbed by it as it becomes increasingly angular and
fragmented. I really like how it does seem to almost slide into
madness… a terrific four minutes!
Last up is ‘Centuries’ with is ominous
beginning signalling something geological may be about to happen! I
found myself thinking this until well into it before realising that it
was already happening. Central to this are the drums which pound away
through most of the track in a free-style which encourages the rest of
the band to do the same… there is a sense of stasis… of never
quite solidifying in anything tangible, and yet at the end there’s a
feeling of completion… the journey rather than the destination being
the key… and if you’re going to call something ‘Centuries’
then it’s not exactly going to have a beginning, middle and end is
it?
I really liked this album because I had
already felt that Blown Out had probably gone as far as they could
with their sound. This album offers something different both from
that, and within the set itself. There’s a degree of variation here
that makes this a very satisfying listen, and acting as an excellent
prism through which to look forward… long live free jazz space doom
funk!
‘Saturn’ is released by Riot Season
Records on 7th February 2020, and is available to pre-order here and
here.
We start this edition of New Weird
Britain, and therefore the ‘Boring Twenties’ (© me, in the pub
last Saturday, roughly five seconds before feeling great shame over
this coinage), with some radge old lags who are embedded throughout
these columns like raisins in a plum duff. We end it that way, too,
and in between there’s a phalanx of first-timers, the creatively
promiscuous and some people you might know already, only wearing a
different hat. Basically, much like it was before. Don’t let some
numbers on a calendar mug you off, I beg!
Nothing mysterious about OZO, at least in
their component parts: a guitar/sax/drums trio featuring Mike Vest and
Karl D’Silva, who performed together in Drunk In Hell and have
discographies I’d rather you spent time researching yourself, plus
Graham Thompson, ex of a remarkably wide spread of north-eastern
English bands.
It does, though, seem like a project that
was intentionally conceived in private: one minute nothing, the next
they’re recording an album and the next it exists, is called Saturn
and is on Riot Season. No live performances yet, but this sick
synthesis of psychedelic rock muckspreading and cosmic jazz outness
would likely slay given sufficient wattage.
Trippy and snaky as these five freely
associating pieces are, OZO feels like a logical progression for the
two ex-DIH members at least. D’Silva’s approach to the alto sax
has evident spiritual/cosmic jazz touchstones that warrant being able
to freak out without bludgeoning, while the guitarist’s approach to
improvisation, put to good use in doom and noise projects, more than
holds its own when in a ‘jazz context’.
His essential tone is fairly similar to
recent Vest ventures like Melting Hand, whose rocked-up cover of Joe
Henderson’s ‘Earth’ on their last album is a precursor of sorts
to Saturn. Expect oceans of phaser and wah; sax flipping ‘tween
sustained ripples into space and stabby squeals; drums loosey-goosey
but thumped with a rocker’s hairy paw; a really great record which
avoids the many pitfalls of jazz/rock crossbreeding while not coming
off like OZO had to try hard to manage this.
Given that Mike Vest’s work-rate never
seems to let up, it can be quite daunting, and a little wearying
approaching yet another release from on of his umpteen bands, yet with
OZO he really does have something which demands you to listen. Not
that you shouldn’t listen to all his other stuff, although a future
primer may provide some inkling of where to start if uninitiated, yet
with OZO he seems to have tapped into a realm which has not quite
reached his grasp…that of free jazz.
Now, you can argue the fact that in fact,
all his music is based in some way on free jazz, and given the
propensity for his space rock shenanigans to expand both their length
and your mind, you are never too far from a “freak out” moment.
Here, on Saturn, that “freak out” is truly gripped by the horns
and thrown straight at you though, making for a quite enticing listen.
It’s probably best at this point to cast
a warning that this may not be for the uninitiated. OZO are deep, and
by deep we mean hitting straight into the heart of the Sun Ra
psychedelic explosion whilst imbibing a mouthful of Frank Zappa acid
tabs…do they exist? If not, they should do. We digress, or rather,
trip lightly on.
So the music…well, it leaps right to the
point as the alto sax on ‘Lifeship’ grips you and pulls you head
first into a maelstrom of noise. This noise then never lets up until
the very end, and even then it’s arguable that the music still plays
on in some other region of your mind, never to let up, a constant
keening sax, knocking on the confines of your skull to be releases.
That release has happened though, for the full glorious 40 minutes or
so that Saturn unravels your mind. It’s playful, it’s frightening,
it’s jolly well looking for a good time and will not stop until it
finds it.
Listen, if you want an album that is gonna
test you, whilst also being a damn fine listen then this is for you.
That is, of course, if you fall into the category of the heavy
psychedelic free jazz section in your local HMV store (they tried it
in Tesco, but those Adele albums next to it caused eruptions in the
ether, causing a few babies to cry). If that’s really not your bag
then stay well away. For us here at E&D towers, well, this is our
morning cup of tea quite frankly, and use it to as a wake up call on
our morning car journey to work. Obviously later it soundtracks a more
bohemian vibe but hey, that’s too crass. Turn on, tune in, and drift
out….man.
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