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Ochre: "Whispers"
From Death Of An Aura (Benbecula; 2008)

Ochre is essentially two things: the colour of coats from the seventies and Christopher Scott Leary, a veritable purveyor of British bleeps working hard to preserve 2004. And in case you’re three or recently paroled, that was the era when IDM was running at close to max capacity, and masterpieces arrived quicker than their imprints could commit them to limited edition. Leary himself was projected to cult status thanks to the now defunct Toytronic, who signed his delicately amazing A Midsummer Nice Dream (2004) and got him a leg-up to the Benbecula Records workshop of weirdness. That’s where he remains to this day, conjuring away with his prototype sequences, only now that it’s the present (duh) he’s got a wily knife in his boot: add a dash of 2011 to the mixture, and coo your audience with tales of a time where the cost of recording with electricity means it’s all going to get done by orchestras.

Taken from his recent Death Of An Aura EP (which in turn is intended as a primer for his third album—keep up at the back there), “Whispers” feels like the tiniest child in a row of Russian dolls; the one you want to kidnap from its ornamental ancestry ‘cos it’s just so darn cutesy. Beaming pools of synthetics snap like robot Rice Crispies while Leary’s humming works the shoegaze routine, erratic as M83 accidentally dialing a fax number. Could you ever imagine Underworld’s “Small Conker And A Twix” made bigger with strings and harmonies? No? Well just run the embed below and imagine you’re hearing a relaxation tape that’s merrily contracting hay fever. It might squelch like an allergy for sure, but with me it caught on fast as fever.

George Bass | 10/21/2008 |                

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