OZONE PLAYER
E
Visual Power (2002)
You can always trust Otso Pakarinen to come up with something unusual when he releases an album under the pseudonym Ozone Player. His latest CD, simply titled E, is one of the wackiest, most bizarre, yet still accessible and infectious recordings you’re gonna hear in a while. Just as on Insane Logic, the last recording of his that I reviewed, Pakarinen has turned his sly wit and considerable skills towards crafting all manner of electronically-infused songs that defy categorization. If you don’t think electronic music can have a sense of humor, just give this album a listen - you’ll change your mind, pronto!
Opening with the best cut on the CD, “My Name Is Bond…Jeeves Bond” E is a roller coaster ride of thrills, laughs, jaw-dropping displays of technological studio wizardry, and enough imagination to last you a month. “My Name Is Bond…” takes the “feel” of any one of the Bond themes, and twists it into something delightfully surreal. Drum programming beats out a high-energy steady pulse while a myriad of keyboards play first the straight ahead “spy” theme and then downshift abruptly into a la-la-carnival refrain. Like I wrote above - wacky, but also lots of fun! “The Wobbling Wardrobe” does, indeed, wobble, with lots of strange vibrato in the opening keyboard refrain, along with spacy effects galore. The introduction of guitar later in the cut brings a strange sense of mystery to the music, but when the same guitar begins a refrain of notes that build higher and higher in intensity, along with the addition of scratchy-sounding beats, the track veers off into pulsing bursts of EM and snaky electric guitar leads. It just keeps ramping up the energy until things boil over at the track’s end.
“Ollism” surely is the strangest thing here (and that’s saying something). As near as I can tell, the song is comprised mostly of found sounds, weird wordless vocalizings (way cool, but impossible to describe except to say it’s like The Blue Man group all doing various drum impression – “barumpa-ba-bbumpa-bump”) while a sandpaper-rubbing rhythm keeps time in the background. This is followed by what may be the most “conventional” cut on the CD, “The Runner.” With it’s blistering lead electric guitar leads, churning drum kit rhythms, and keening synth chords, the song certainly evokes a sensation of speed - to say the least. The lengthy mid-section bridge dials down the rhythms to a finger-snapping mid-tempo and the synths become more funky and more like straight ahead EM.
Placed as the sixth track, “Light Music for Small Masses” is a crazy combo platter of gamelan-like gongs juxtaposed by squiggly electronic effects. When compared to most of the rest of the music on E, this is “light” music (except for the buzz-saw distortions near the track’s end!). “Saurus” (the tenth song on the CD) closes things out with an always evolving nearly seven-minute long piece that morphs from drifting somewhat darkish ambient/noise to pumping beats over swirling keyboards and a funky bass line to midtempo rhythms with hints of Middle Eastern world fusion electronica modalities and ending with proggish layers of electronic keyboards reminiscent of The Nice, ELP, and other organ/synth instrumentalists.
If you don’t have a sense of humor about music or your taste runs to sedate ambient or more structured varieties of EM, such as Berlin school, E is not for you. On the other hand, if you want to hear audacious, gutsy, inventive keyboard/guitar/beats instrumentals that never become too avant garde, experimental, or pointless (in other words, you can actually dance to this stuff - or kinda dance, at least!), this recording will open you to a lot of new possibilities of what electronic music is capable of these days. Kudos to Pakarinen for refusing to take his synthesizers too seriously; yet taking his craft as a musician seriously enough to deliver the goods. Engineering and mix on the disc is a wonder - headphones are required, along with the ability to grin!
Bill Binkelman
WIND and WIRE