THE i-mockery YSI thread!

[iron mitchell]

Orthrelm - Ov

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"There’s a brief passage in the John Fahey story “The Center of Interest Will Not Hold” that always comes to mind when I think of the best way to describe the inviting and, in its finest moments, intoxicating methods of minimalist composition. It’s a description of Fahey seeing Hank Williams perform on a Potomac River excursion boat back in 1953, and it goes like this:
“And then he started playing, not singing, ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,’ a 12-bar blues in E. And he played it and played it over and over again. For about 10 minutes. Then he started singing. But when he did sing he only sang a few verses and then he came to an abrupt halt. It was so incredibly surprising and intense that it was frightening. After he stopped there was a silence for a long time. We were all hypnotized.”
I would not be surprised in the least to find out Mick Barr and Josh Blair, the respective guitarist and drummer of Orthrelm, knew the Fahey passage (taken from the must-own book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life) by heart. On the duo’s blistering, one-song epic OV, everything hinges on the way patterns and repetitions can lull a listener into submission and then pull the rug from beneath them, only to seduce them into another series of patterns and repetitions. At first blush, the record — all 45 minutes of it — is a dense and impassable jungle of droning and clattering and rolling noise. But repeated listens reveal alarming depths and a manner of composition that, like the pen-and-ink maze scribbled alongside the handwritten liner notes inside OV, is frighteningly complex in its simplicity.
The record isn’t so much a 45-minute composition as a series of performance segments with a massive, 17-minute introduction. During that lengthy but tightly scripted intro, the band does everything to dissuade the meek or unwilling or uninitiated from journeying further within, throwing seemingly endless loops of fingernail-on-chalkboard guitar shrieks over rumbling, kick-drum-crazed, warp-speed percussion. No bass, no voice, no verse, no chorus, no escape — this is an atypical mass of thunderous rock adrenaline, and Orthrelm wants to make sure you’re ready for the ride. Around the 17:40-mark, it’s meltdown time, the drums abruptly peeling back for a machine-gun slash and burn over a single guitar string. The moment really lasts only a few seconds — a blink of the eye given the length of the entire recording — but it carries a momentum and a punch that shifts the force of the whole damned record, like a planet being thrown out of its numbing rotations around the sun.
The loops and clattering passages continue in a series of right-to-the-gut bursts and expansive drones, but there’s a more organic pace to them, a sense that the musicians are in control of the noise (and not vice versa) and they’ve now completely trapped the listener in the proceedings. At 19:45, the shrieking treble-heavy patterns are buttressed, on every fourth and then third note, by the crunch of a power chord that could force the Steve Albini of Shellac’s At Action Park to crack a smile. Before we hit 22:00, there’s the repeated hit of an open note and then a full breakdown, a roll of almost-tribal tom hits interrupted sporadically by a hammered four-note Space Invaders measure. At 23:05, everything erupts again and we’re back into the shrieking repetitions. At 23:30, your wonder how the duo can hammer out the refrains without their fingers spontaneously bursting into flames. By 24:30, the borderline furious and nearly frenetic 4/4 march speeds up to the point where it’s hard to tell if Barr — his guitar now almost echoing the avant-rock/metal tones of David Pajo on Tweez — is even plucking out notes with a guitar pick or just madly sliding his fingers all over the frets, whatever it takes to get that viscous delivery.
The record continues unfolding with these bizarrely dramatic moments and passages to its closing hurrah (the curtain drops with a bang, not a whimper, and is trailed only by about eight seconds of deathly silence), but the point of diagramming only a few of them illustrates their alarming impact. This is a difficult record, no question about it, and even those open to structurally challenging rock/metal noise (a la Don Cab or much of the Ipecac catalog) might be turned off by the commitment one has to make before the band delivers the release to that epic practice of tension-building. It would be unfair, ridiculous, and even blasphemous to say Orthrelm is in a league with Fahey or the Hank Williams that Fahey envisions/recalls/constructs in “The Center of Interest Will Not Hold.” But when it comes to that passage, they definitely get it. And your ears will be all the better for tuning in. It’s hypnotism time." -Justin Vellucci


"D.C.-based duo Orthrelm (Mick Barr on guitar and Josh Blair on drums) has never fit the mold of, say, Lightning Bolt or Ruins (or even Ui!). They’ve always had a few too many Derek Bailey records on deck for that, and a few too many Napalm Death ones, too. Their earlier discs featured Barr sounding like an amalgam of Blood Ulmer harmolodics, death metal shred, and spiky Bailey-isms. But on this new full-length – consisting of one 45-minute tune – the band has changed styles considerably. The largest shift is from an all-out avoidance of repetition to a full-on experiment with it.
Repetition is what rock is all about, after all. But OV, while played by fellows who clearly have roots in and an affinity for heavy music, isn’t so much about sludge as it is about spasm. Think back to the halcyon days of vinyl, and picture Ride the Lightning or Among the Living. Right in the middle of a crazed guitar solo, with 32nd notes flying, the needle gets stuck in the groove - that’s OV. It’s Orthrelm maxing out minimalism - a kind of trance-thrash. Either that, or it’s the early '90s Melvins on 78 rpm. Blair’s rolling, tuned toms could almost be a sample from some awesome Louis Moholo-Moholo improvisation, were it not for the grinding, motoric repetition. And Barr’s sharp, brittle tone suggests the influence of shred-master metal as well as flinty free improv.
Each section includes a number of subtle modulations: change of attack, occasional morphing of tempo, and so forth. And there's no denying the duo’s chemistry – they’re locked in tight to the concept and to each other’s playing (very specific drum patterns cue the section changes, often just modulations of the same repeated lick from Blair). The dynamics and structure of the piece aren’t too surprising or challenging; for the most part, things ratchet up continually, with some occasional cool-downs during the latter third of the disc. The first flareup occurs roughly ¼ of the way in, with some particularly fierce unison playing (almost like some thrashy mutation of the end of Mahavishnu’s “The Noonward Race”). The first major break occurs just shy of OV’s midpoint, sounding almost as if the cage to some aviary is open, unleashing a flock of mad birds. From there, however, things slow down, air out, and the duo almost trade licks, which assume an increasingly Middle Eastern flavor, until the big metal moment of the disc’s conclusion.
The polar opposite of Sleep’s mighty Dopesmoker, the jittery OV is a 45-minute mindfuck. It’s almost like the end is beside the point: you get the feeling that no matter when, you could check in on Orthrelm and they’d still be wailing and hacking away at this material. It’s a pretty intense ride." -Jason Bivins


"Orthrelm's OV consists of patterns laid across a giant, horizontal canvas, one after another. Each pattern (or algorithm or gestalt, to use academic terms often applied to minimalist artwork) is small-- perhaps the size of your average metal riff-- and is self-contained. That is, each one relates to nothing outside of itself, and works through a "predictably terminating" process before moving on to the next. Which is still to say, OV is both a blueprint and the final result of a pretty amazing idea: hardcore minimalism in a rock context. Hardcore? Minimalism? This record, which could almost as easily be communicated via a series of 8x10-inch grids containing tiny, elaborate arrangements of points and lines, crosses a whole range of "high art" concepts. In fact, its "rock context" is more dubious than its artsy conceits, raising the question of whether electric guitars have to signify rock, or are capable of something else. Indeed, OV is something else.
In any case, isn't minimalism is supposed to be dead? That's what any art critic worth his pretension will tell you-- and has, on and off, for about 35 years-- despite the fact its remnants can be seen in almost every strand of art henceforth. Minimalist visual art happened as a result of simultaneous decisions made in the late 1950s by several young (and almost exclusively white male American) artists reacting against the wildly subjective Abstract Expressionist movement. Abstract expressionist artists like Jackson Pollack were about capturing personal experience or emotion in the purest, visceral sense. That's all well and good-- and sort of punk when you think about it-- but when Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman came along and did the same with broad planes of color and precisely defined geometrical shapes, it started to seem less a quasi-anarchic roar of purpose, and more a quasi-formalist one. So, rather than put forth subjective statements, the successive generation of artists aimed to produce art as object in and of itself, more apt to use mathematical formulas than emotional drive to create their works. This could manifest itself in anything from Sol Le Witt's math-generated sculptures, to Jo Baer's monochrome canvas-work to Dan Flavin's arrangement of neon lights on museum walls.
There was a concurrent "movement" in classical music towards minimalism, though unlike in the visual art critical establishment, nobody really made an effort to brand it as such. In the early 60s, La Monte Young, described by Brian Eno as the "grandfather of us all", was writing really slow, really lengthy pieces of chamber music in the serialist tradition (then the dominant strain of modern classical music, serialism is the organization of notes, rhythms, and other musical elements according to numerical formulae)-- perhaps the musical equivalent of painter Robert Ryman's General series of pure white paintings. Young soon moved to working with sine waves and drone performances that could last for days, or longer. However, you can't really release an LP of a weeklong performance, and a more popular, compact strain of minimalism was port forth by Terry Riley, who used tape loops and delay to concoct sprawling, repetitive soundscapes. He completed the landmark In C in 1964, whose concepts led directly to a whole school of repetition-based music from which Steve Reich and Philip Glass (not to mention Neu! and Can) made a killing.
Until now, I would never have thought to compare Orthrelm to those musicians. The Washington D.C.-based duo's previous albums-- including an almost inhumanly fragmented, 99-track EP (!) Asristir Vieldriox from 2002-- were models of monolithic non-repetition. Guitarist Mick Barr (formerly of Crom-Tech) and drummer Josh Blair (also of math-jazzers ABCs) specialized in music obviously rooted in metal, but performed as a steady string of ultra-speed riffs and brittle patterns, thrown against each other in Pollack-like collage: no clear linear progression, but when viewed from a distance, as technically impressive as it is chaotic. John Zorn's Naked City is a precedent, as Orthrelm recall the intensity of the fastest hardcore punk, and the virtuosity of the gone-est conservatory shredders-- not to mention being pretty light on their feet. However, if you wanted jams with beats and wailing choruses, you were out of luck; the band played alien etudes, but not necessarily "rawk." But if fans were left wanting something easier to tap along with, the band's latest delivers the goods in spades.
OV, containing a single 45-minute composition, makes as good an introduction to putting oneself into a trance as it does to minimalism or instrumental prog. Although recorded over a period of months, the title piece is presented as a single performance, each segment locking into the next, on and on until everything simply stops. And just as I described Orthrelm's prior releases as monolithic, this one threatens to glaze over the eardrums of anyone not particularly fascinated by the prospect of a metal mosaic, massive in size with attention to minute detail. Yet, it is the attention to detail-- the baroque refinery of the individual riffs and drum patterns-- that makes OV more than just an impressive technical feat (or an excruciating bore). As with the additive, metric modulation of Glass (who cribbed his technique from Indian raga) or Reich's rhythmic phasing, Orthrelm somehow makes music more than the sum of its innumerable parts.
At the heart of OV are adrenaline and discipline; abandon and meditation. I'm tempted to recommend the album to anyone interested in learning how to meditate; beyond the sheer length and precision of the music, I wonder if Barr and Blair had to put themselves in some kind of Zen state just to record the stuff. As the passages fly by-- beginning with the pounded tritone introduction, to a diced three-note guitar motive and tom-toms cascade, to sections featuring the thrash of cymbals and high-range dissonance alternating with sections where the drums drop out entirely and guitar lands on sustained, sine-like tones-- I look for inter-connections. Unlike traditionally minimalist music, OV's structure follows an "A to B to C" path, rather than the less intrusive (but arguably more subtle) "A1 to A2 to A3" method of Glass and Reich. On this record, each pattern takes on its own identity, seemingly unrelated to anything happened before-- yet, the speed and consistency of attack (Barr's fingers must be robotic) serve to blur the edges of what might otherwise sound disjointed.
I'm not sure history's great minimal artists would approve of OV, on the structural grounds I noted above, or due to the fact that Orthrelm's music just seems so, well, big. Of course, Frank Stella's grid-like aluminum paintings were as tall as people, while some of the great single-artist installations of the 60s and 70s could take up entire galleries, so you never know. Ultimately, this record stands as a towering achievement in its own right, regardless the context you visualize. And maybe this many words are overkill for what I'm really trying to say: This is fucking great." -Dominique Leone