OSMIUM announce debut self-titled album – out 20th June via Invada records
Hildur Guðnadóttir / Rully Shabara (Senyawa) / James Ginzburg (Emptyset/Ginz) / Sam Slater
Hear / share “OSMIUM 1” HERE
Credit: Camille Blake
Today, experimental supergroup OSMIUM have shared details of their eagerly awaited debut self-titled album. “OSMIUM” is out 20th June via Geoff Barrow’s Invada Records and is announced alongside a new single titled “OSMIUM 1”. Having previously debuted their material live at Unsound, the group is made up of the Oscar-winning Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, who has recorded with the likes of Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle and Múm, as well as performing live with Sunn O))) and Fennesz. She has composed the scores for, among others, “Chernobyl” and “Tár”, to much critical acclaim. She’s joined in Osmium by Emptyset and Subtext engineer and producer James Ginzburg, Senyawa’s idiosyncratic vocalist Rully Shabara and the Grammy-winning sound designer / producer Sam Slater.
Alloying burnished electroacoustic soundscapes with dense, metallic drones, barbed rhythms and buckled, bio-mechanical vocalizations, OSMIUM’s debut album doesn’t try to cast a rigid future. Rather, it tempers a viscous flow of unorthodox speculations that smolders through the distant past, blazing a trail all the way to the frontier of fate. Absorbed by questions about the relationship between humans and technology, tradition and progression, the individual and the group, OSMIUM channel their experience and expertise into a set of forward-thinking sonic interrogations that skewer established cultural preconceptions. And although genre is acknowledged – the album draws from folk, doom metal, 20th century minimalism, industrial music and extreme noise – there’s never a sense that it’s riveted firmly in place.
While each member brings along a laundry list of accolades, the project is far greater than the sum of its parts. Widely known for her aforementioned soundtrack work and run of acclaimed solo albums on Touch, Guðnadóttir plays the halldorophone, a unique cello-like electroacoustic instrument designed by Halldór Úlfarsson that allows the performer to harness unstable feedback loops. Taking his cues from this process, Sam Slater – who’s worked alongside Jóhann Jóhannsson, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Ben Frost and others – generates rhythms using a self-oscillating drum he custom designed with KOMA Elektronik, and Subtext boss and Emptyset member Ginzburg responds in kind, producing booming tambura-like sonorities from a device he developed himself based on the monocord, an ancient single-stringed resonator.
OSMIUM synchronize the three unique instruments using a custom system of robotics to generate basic rhythms that underpin their improvisations and experiments, and although Shabara just uses his voice, it’s his alien tones that supply the band with their conceptual fulcrum. The vocalist is one of South Asia’s most recognizable underground artists, and the sounds he’s able to create using exhaustively rehearsed extended techniques are so distinctive that he’s been studied by scientists back home in Indonesia. As part of OSMIUM, Shabara attempts to merge with the band’s machines, warping his vocal cords to mimic the robotics and originate hoarse percussive cracks and eldritch tonalities.
The first taste of this comes in the form of “OSMIUM 1”, which sees Shabara’s primordial growls, harsh breathing, and pre-lingual utterances sputter out across vicious distortion, kinetic industrial drones, and metallic, percussive noise. The track builds and escalates around Shabara’s cybernetic, shamanic outbursts, which twist and overwhelm the charging instrumentation before everything breaks down into a slower and more ominous final section.
HEAR / SHARE “OSMIUM 1” HERE
Speaking on the single Sam Slater, says “When we recorded this track, Rully was completely in a trance — he went somewhere and then came back. Likewise when we play this track live, every time I look up from the drums I see the audience totally locked in to Rully, pushed and pulled by the waves and intensity.”
Never weighed down by needless sound design or modish ornamentation, it’s music that feels authentically experimental; OSMIUM have figured out an awkward symmetry between their discrete approaches, concentrating their gaze on the outcome rather than the process. The result is a work of science fiction that’s driven by interaction, conversation and sensation.
“OSMIUM” is out 20th June via Invada Records – pre-order HERE
Album art
Tracklisting:
1) Osmium 0
2) Osmium 1
3) Osmium 2
4) Osmium 3
5) Osmium 4
6) Osmium 5
7) Osmium 6
8) Osmium 7
OSMIUM is:
Hildur Guðnadóttir – Haldorophone
Rully Shabara – Vocals
Sam Slater – Feedback Percussion
James Ginzburg – Bass Monochord
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