Oopppph!


Long overdue (and well worth waiting for) follow up to Ossia’s debut on BEB last year. Keeping things suitably dank and underground the Young Echo Collective member finds a very suitable home on Berceuse Heroique, bastion of uncompromising dance sonics.

No messing around here, this release is split over two plates, both on 180g vinyl, it was a nightmare getting these up the stairs, they weigh a ton. Housed in a picture sleeve with golden era Metalheadz type on the labels and spine. There’s also a poster in there too courtesy of the chaps at Studio Tape-Echo, indebted to Soviet era propaganda and cold war paranoia.

Enough about all that you might say, what about the music? That’s where things get really interesting, we have two originals, ‘Control’ and ‘Information’, each backed by their respective versions. First up, ‘Control’, a slab of mutant dancehall gone rogue, bussing up the traditional confines of arrangement and heading off into unchartered territory, pure dread, pure bass weight and a sticky dubwise atmosphere that gets almost unbearably claustrophobic at points.

Things turn even nastier when ‘Information’ is up - We can only assume that this beast of a track was what inspired the Headz’ golden era type on the sleeve (We told you there was a reason for the gushing intro paragraph). Deeply unsettling percussion leads you into pure sub pressure, punctured by contorted mentasams before opening out into ferrous, panoramic synthscapes.

The versions, however, are where this release comes into it’s own though - Versions in the truest sense of the word, both cuts are reloaded back into the desk and stripped bare, the original inky blackness of the original cuts permeated by thunder clap snares and scalpel sharp delay tails.

This reductionist approach leaves things as raw as they come, crackles from the slightly knackered EQ pots on the desk bleed through, one shot percussion hits are twisted through tape-echo delays, pushed and pulled around the mix with considerable skill, no doubt honed over many late night sessions both on the mixing desk and in the DJ booth.

This is the real deal, all killer, no filler - four slabs of total dread that’ll scare the sh*t out of you again and again.
Form an orderly queue.

Control

Control (Version)

Information

Information (Version)