(2020) Black to Comm - Oocyte Oil & Stolen Androgens


Review:
Black to Comm‘s third release on Thrill Jockey expands on themes and ideas of pieces that Marc Richter originally composed for site-specific installations. The short album starts with the nearly 18-minute “Gustav Metzger as Erwin Piscator, Gera, January 1915,” a surrealist audio drama filled with cryptic voices and carefully sculpted electro-acoustic soundscapes, equally reminiscent of Robert Ashley, Nurse with Wound, and Leyland Kirby. Beginning with swirling, fragmented voices and manipulated cymbal clangs, an eerie, glitchy melody emerges, setting the stage for a confidently spoken recitation, eloquently painting a scene of wartime horror. The speaker’s cadence is lyrical, with each of the short poetic verses punctuated with the refrain “Rataplan, rataplan, rataplan,” providing a rhythmic thread. After a brief recollection by an elderly man, the piece enters a gorgeous, haunting midsection filled with delicate, rippling string instruments, sporadic drum pounds, and some stray Mellotron-sounding notes, building up to a stunning, weightless climax. The shorter pieces that make up the remainder of the album each focus on one scene instead of forming an epic narrative. Some of them are built around shards of pop songs, looping a few notes in sequences that are closer to breathing cycles than melodies. The most dissonant piece, “Gepackte Zeit,” is based on the music of German composer and conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, layering strings and effects to produce a mesmerizing glow. The brief conclusion of the album revisits the “Rataplan” verse, playfully matching the spoken cadence with piano notes and setting it to canned horns and splayed beats, somewhat awkwardly countering with the ethereal mood of the preceding pieces. Still, Oocyte Oil & Stolen Androgens is an affecting work which explores memory perception and understanding of human speech from several perspectives.





Tracklist:
01 - Gustav Metzger as Erwin Piscator, Gera, January 1915
02 - Stolen Androgens
03 - Oocyte Oil
04 - Gepackte Zeit (für Hanne Darboven)
05 - Rataplan, Rataplan, Rataplan (Arms and Legs Flying in the Air)


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, experimental
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits