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CD
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EMEGO 301CD
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Editions Mego welcomes Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new album of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7. Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalization of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. Piano Music 1-7, subtitled Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow's investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker. Recorded in late 2020.
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LP
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EMEGO 301LP
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LP version. Editions Mego welcomes Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new album of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7. Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalization of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. Piano Music 1-7, subtitled Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow's investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker. Recorded in late 2020.
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LP
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AF 020LP
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on the feet of a wind is a wild assemblage of carbonated synthetic music from Powell and a sister record to flash across the intervals (AF 018LP) and multiply the sides -- two albums already released in 2020. Recalling Xenakis, Parmegiani, and Hecker but with the smile/smirk of vintage Powell, the record is released via a folder, a new music and film platform created by Powell, Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs that bundles up music, film, image, text and other forms of madness into folders that are shared/expanded online. The release is accompanied by a "Hi-sensitive" film directed by Amstad and Eknæs entitled "flares, currents". The film contains a recombined live version of "rise, world unfold", the musical series that concludes this album. a folder is a collection of disorienting works of experimental film, ambiguous texts, and other assorted media set to the most brazenly strange and formlessly mesmerizing musical structures of Powell's career. It's also a work of artistic assemblage, without fixed notions of time. Tarkovsky once described his filmmaking as "sculpting in time," and a folder exists in a similar kind of "zone;" it is a project continuously added to, subtracted from, abstracted, and injected into the glut of cyberspace like a slow-moving pathogen that refuses to be defined or categorized. Shunning titles in favor of oblique category markers, films like a?34 present a mosaic of images of biological forms and sublime landscapes set to super-synthetic, carbonated compositions. All of this signals an artist liberated from the confines of the narrow branding signifiers an electronic musician can find themselves in. While it is aware of its place in cyberspace, this project also connects to something primordial and awesome. "Xenakis talked about creating universes with sound," says Powell, "and we are all free to create our own worlds in life, art -- whatever. This is what happened to me in a way: I have been in this world for three years or something, and I don't really want to leave. The folder is a refuge. "Endlessly strange and formlessly mesmerizing" --The Quietus.
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LP
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AF 018LP
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Flash Across The Intervals is the first new Powell LP since 2016's Sport on XL Recordings, and the first music available physically since his 2018 collaboration with Turner-Prize winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans. Oscar (Powell) wanted it known that this is not intended as a definitive album, the realization/release of some bold new statement, a singular mark of identity or triumphant elucidation of years of valiant work. Rather, it is simply 35 minutes of music segmented from an overall flow of stuff, a variable torrent of hyper-synthetic composition brought about by entirely other things -- circumstances that relate in no way to a previous life led within an occasionally toxic bubble of taste, music, entertainment, and "community". As René Char once wrote, "No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions," and so it is that we can become bereft of courage, stripped of any enduring connection to our work, dissociated from many of the fragile and reactionary structures that previously held us up. When the illusion of reality dissolves around you, how can you not think as Leibniz once did: "We thought we had arrived at port, but found ourselves thrown back out on the open sea." It is easy to be molded by a contemporary space that leaves you with no possibility of creating anything at all; in a kind of zero state of expression that inevitably forces you to look elsewhere ➜ to pursue a Deleuzian line of escape out towards a horizon line that never draws closer. Here, at least, out on the waves, new cartographies can be traced and new connections formed. This "album" thus functions as a message in a bottle: cast from unknown coordinates, it maps some of these connections, not least in its close relationship with the visual work of Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs (afolder.studio). Their imagery inflates this sleeve; the music inflates their films. What emerges from the fog is a luminous three-headed constellation of melodic lines in non-sensical interplay with one another. Here on record, spinning at a speed of your choosing and with eyes closed and no imagery to hand, the feeling persists of a deep decentering, music discontinuously carbonated by a different geography of relations, the depths of which this music begins to explore. Includes double-sided, four-panel printed insert; edition of 250.
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LP
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DIAG 041LP
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Powell loosens up and reaches out on the second New Beta playground for Diagonal, budging bones and buns in seven hot-stepping, curiously emotive permutations that swerve from Æ-style abstraction to pointillist electro-acid and a brace of mutant diskotheek breakers. As with the first volume (DIAG 038LP), he's clearly still gassed off his new hardware, resulting a nerve-jumping fizz and crack that sounds like he's jamming with fingers directly in the jack ports. Like some cyborg antagonist who can't stand to see humans plodding four-square do-si-do in the dance, Powell fractures and gels the groove in wickedly freakish exercises, increasingly finding himself attracted to near beat-less structures to give his dancers and listeners more jelly limbed options for kinaesthetic interpretation and fucking weird feels. On "PosTAe", he prangs out in sincere tribute to arch 'borgs Autechre with a hot mess of haywire modular plongs, before "Sneak 2_05" catches him cutting back to the ascetic funk of his earliest 12"s, this time sharper, serpentine, before "Rudeboy, Let's Funk" catapults us into something like a scrap between Trevor Jackson and Luke Vibert, all clipped drum clatter and acid zig-zags itching for the sweat, farts and perfume of the 'floor. "Slippy Pig" jabs the B-side into play with some of the EP's nattiest, stepping impulses drawing a line from The Normal through Ed Rush's Wormhole (1998) via The Bocaccio, then "Drumz VIP" darts like some deviant jazz-funk oddity from West London, with its dissonant flourishes making way for the febrile blatz of "Hoi!!" and the record's surprise standout in the richly colorful and dynamic phrasing of "Strobe", perhaps the smartest/goofiest iteration of Powell's new sound in circulation. RIYL: Autechre, Aphex Twin, Din A Testbild; all the best oddballs. Vinyl only -- no digital. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.
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12"
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XLT 730EP
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UK producer and DJ Powell continues to blur the lines between contemporary club music, punk, and forward-thinking computer acid with Insomniac/Should've Been a Drummer. Describing the music is a challenging prospect... but dancing to it isn't. Both as an artist in his own right and through the music released on his Diagonal label, Oscar Powell has established himself among the 2010s' most singular, exciting artists. The music is tough, but always playful.
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12"
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DIAG 016EP
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Cabaret Voltaire legend Richard H. Kirk and Ancient Methods take the skin right off Powell's Club Music (DIAG 009EP) killers. Ancient Methods' "Körpersäure 91'" remix of "Club Music" fits Diagonal's fetish for Front 242 with a mighty display of stentorian holler, steel-tipped drums, and acid-guzzling revs, taken to techno-punk extremes on the double-timed, full-body douse of the "Pogo Im Säurebad" remix. Kirk's "Main Mix" of "So We Went Electric" reduces Powell's slugger to a rasping, grinding shadow while retaining its stiff, coiled backbone, and the desiccated "Dub Mix" leaves traces of metaphysical dread from the wild-eyed original in its wake.
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2CD
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DIAG 018CD
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2016 repress. Powell's club-breaking series of 12" singles is now available on CD as 11-14, this killer, comprehensive two-CD collection. It charts the uncompromising development of one of this decade's most ruthless new artists through 18 original tracks taken from five EPs for three different labels -- including his own, Diagonal -- and features a searing collaboration with national noise treasure Russell Haswell. Syncing the muscle memory of late '90s drum and bass with a kink for the toughest '80s industrial and bleeding-edge electronics, Powell's music has emerged as a virile antidote to the conservatism of current dance music. With his first pair of self-released singles, The Ongoing Significance of Steel & Flesh (2011) and the Body Music EP (2012), he established an ascetic, bare-bones approach that resonated with the original no wave mantra -- "rip it up and start again" -- in a barefaced challenge to what was then deemed acceptable on the dancefloor. Precedent set, the controversial four-track Untitled EP (RAVE 002EP, 2013) revealed a more optimized, muscular take on his rollicking torque and freeform, caustic electronics at the cusp of the analog/digital schism. Late 2013 saw the coiled hard-step of Fizz and his most explicit alloys of motorik jungle-techno, before the Club Music EP (DIAG 009EP, 2014) combined all of these influences and exploded with spectacular, unpredictable brilliance, dosing a whole rave's worth of overloaded sensation into three brutally edited constructions, including the notorious "Maniac," starring label-mate and hardwave peer Russell Haswell. Central to it all, from the swaggering stomp of "Body Music" and "Oh No New York" to the deadly jag of "No U Turn," is a tensile, insatiable sense of urgency and a healthy disregard for convention. Mastered by Matt Colton.
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12"
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RAVE 002EP
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2014 repress. This is Powell's keenly-awaited 12" for The Death Of Rave. "A Band" emphasizes a chimeric indistinction between the "real" textures of sample-spliced guitars and drums, and the gritted tension of painstakingly processed electronics, whereas "Acid" feels more like Bob Ostertag or Russell Haswell mangling Phuture. "Rider" is a nod to Suicide, yet sliced with the precision of prime period Dom & Optical, while "Oh No New York" is a sort of steampunk alternative to the perceived evolution of dance music.
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