Weekly > Features
Oskar LP:2 Track By Track Guide
A few years ago we introduced our readers to a superb EP and then debut album by Oskar comprising of Jonny Dawe and Nick Powell with Sarah Wilson and various guests contributing.
They are releasing their imaginatively titled ‘LP:2’ on June 22 on CD and digitally through Incarnation Records.
We did consider running an interview, we did consider getting Nick to write something for us in a similar vein to a great feature he did for us a few years ago, but ultimately we fancied doing something a little different with this release.
The reason for that is that the album is one of those rare and beautiful albums where you listen to it and can’t immediately place the instrumentation or the themes that have gone into it, instead you listen again and again until it reveals itself to you little by little.
So we decided to get Nick Powell from the group to talk us through each track, he explains better than we do trust me and more importantly I think it gives you a brilliant insight into the creative process from one of our favourite artists…as you’ll see though he didn’t always get the last word in with band mate Jonny Dawes heckling and chipping in, in the background!
PAPER CUTS:
Is a song of two halves: one a mesmeric instrumental led by Sarah’s ascending cello line and punctuated with various noises generated from strange and often broken instruments we have hanging around in The Cooler, Oskar’s lair in the heart of N16, the other a hymn to insomnia, paranoia and general wall-climbing, led by Jonny’s mighty and relentless bassline.
Our old mate (and label boss) Astrid Williamson shares the vocal duties. It began life with the halves the other way round, with the paranoia lapsing into the instrumental, but we reversed it and to me that seems edgier. It’s like being assaulted by anxiety just as you’re dropping off to sleep. Besides, for me, the cello section works as a kind of aural palette cleanser to prepare you for the sonic feast of the rest of the album. I can’t believe I just wrote that. Sorry.
JD: Ouch!!
EDEN:
I like to think of this as music for an Edwardian striptease interrupted by My Bloody Valentine. Notice the striptease gets the last word in.
SOME SONG:
Features a spoken vocal from our performance artist friend and collaborator Sharon Smith and drums from Ed Grimshaw. I love the way the woman in the story seems to become more and more empowered as the music builds up behind her. She talks about finding herself naked onstage…. Maybe this is the link between PAPER CUT’s anxiety and EDEN’s striptease? I have a fantasy about playing this live in drag (although I haven’t run it by Jonny and Sarah yet).
JD: The only track in which we get to boo our guest vocalist.
REICHENBACH FALLS:
Jonny found this old recording of a phonetic poem by Hugo Ball which would have first been performed at the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in the 1910’s, which is something I’ve been fascinated by for years. It sounds really mournful, but it’s actually nonsense. We wanted to build on that by setting it to subtly transcendent music. Sad and painful things often reduce people to barking gibberish.
JD: 2 things……love the “synthy” cello line great balance of sequenced but human. Professor Moriarty, his swansong, and facing up to your nemesis.
Weblinks
Add to favouritesHA DE LLEGAR:
This was originally a song from a Spanish version of the Peter Weiss play ‘Marat Sade’ that I wrote the music for in Madrid last year. The words are a declaration of belief in a socialist utopia, so I put them to a kind of nursery rhyme theme as, although they’re appealing, I suppose at these days they seem a bit naïve. Once the rest of Oskar got their hands on it, it took on a whole new Velvetsy depth. It really takes off in the instrumental outro, helped by Al Saunders on drums.
TWO SUGARS:
One comes from fucking around with a cello loop in the computer, the other from messing about with a piano loop in an old analogue delay unit. They seemed to compliment each other. Sweetly.
JD: See Sucrose and Lactose. Also remember that part of the tracks origin saw us walking/recording in opposite directions around the inner circle of the V&A etc etc. Two travellers exchange greetings at an unknown point in their journey, …..sorry this is ‘Sonic Feast territory!!? NP: I’d say so, wouldn’t you?
PRINTER TZARA:
We made the backing first. To me it’s like music from a forgotten thriller: all rotary dial telephones and dramatic strings. Astrid added her mysterious and sexy vocal (Kim Gordon-esque) that seems to be harking back to the days of the Cabaret Voltaire again.
JD: For me this track’s understated wandering becomes its success.
HI-BEAM BLUE:
This song goes on quite a journey, I don’t really want to say much about it as I think it’s a song to make your own movie to. We wrote and sang the words together (I just got an image of The Partridge Family in my head… it wasn’t like that….). They seem to be about the exhilaration of travel. Or maybe they’re about dieing.
The music took a while to evolve as it’s quite layered. And I have no idea how we’re going to manage to play it live, but we’re going to have to give it a go as it’s my current favourite.
SIMPLE LINES:
This song, musically and lyrically, tries to capture a moment. It’s about staying up all night, alone with someone you maybe shouldn’t have, and leaving a strange house when it’s just getting light and making your way home as London wakes up around you. So it’s kind of a journey from a very pure and simple moment back into the confusion and complications of normal life. And it’s a reminder to hold onto those simple moments.
It’s just occurred to me that it’s about the same time of day as the insomniac half of Paper Cuts, but a completely different experience of it. JD- this is a good example of how Me and Nick often reach a united goal from different angles, my drive with this track was almost a visual interpretation of the sounds, almost like a mathematical bar graph, heavy bleeps on the y axis, and more human layered stuff on the x axis, the struggle for dominance between them, and the resulting parity. NP: Ouch yourself!
SANATORIO:
When I was working on Marat Sade last year, we did some workshops with patients in a psychiatric hospital in Madrid. One day, when I was recording the workshop, a group of previously uncommunicative patients in their 60s and 70s started singing songs from their childhoods, and, maybe even more amazingly, applauding each other when they had sung. According to the staff this was absolutely unprecedented. It seemed like a good idea to make an Oskar track around the recording of that moment.
I’ll leave the lasts words to Jonny who compares our two albums like this:
JD: ‘The debut worked more as an undulating drift; it carried a melancholy from start to finish. The shape of ‘LP:2’ has a variety of contrasts. It is still a journey in form but it has more hills and valleys, different terrain and a stranger climate. Like New Zealand.’
Which is a ridiculous thing to say. But he’s absolutely right.
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