Edley ODowd — F(Our)-Ward
Edley ODowd is a visual artist, producer, drummer in Toilet Boys, PTV3 and collaborator with the late Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. He's a multi-discipline musician with a career spanning 30 years. F(Our)-Ward is his first solo album; a work that seems to be engraved deeply by ODowd’s history in experimental music.
F(our)Ward is a play on words, conceptualised by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The core of these recordings heavily leans into old-school electronics, freshening up with the rhythmic counterparts- all top with cinematic materialization, which is spooky, haunting and eerie at times and quite appealing.
Three pieces, three different narrations. The album kicks in with “Galactic Immersion”, where abrasive beats are marching onto cycloid synth lines, saturated with spoken word and theremin and illuminating playfully in the vein of (more recent and deranged) Psychic TV. “Constance C. Craving”, is monolithic and bleak, an overwhelming synth-based, nightmarish chaos in the vein of that classic industrial sound of the ’80s. “Morgue Wheel”, is cinematic and ritualistic, spawning darkness and agony with its frontal vocal chanting, malevolent electronics and a sick piano from the depths of hell.
F(our)Ward is electronic fetishism at its best- it’s an album with momentum, which blasts off with a noticeable climax. It’s thirty minutes of obliteration, shifting into three different realms of electronic soundscaping.