Nommo Ogo — Across Time and Space

If I saw this in a record store I’d be expecting something completely different to how it sounds. Never judge a book by its cover I guess but the artwork on this just makes you expect you’re about to hear an Ozric Tentacles album. Big patches of colour on an 8 panel fold out sleeve that look like they’re done by some stoned hippies with a big packet of felt tips. No offence to anyone who likes that sort of artwork but it really gives completely the wrong impression of the album contained within it and could easily stop people casually picking it whilst browsing. But that aside what does the music sound like?

I don’t know a whole lot about Nommo Ogo and information seems to be fairly sparse. It appears they came out of the Alaskan psychedelic noise scene of the mid nineties though are now based in Oakland California.

Across Time and Space was recorded between 2002 and 2006 in various places from the USA to Germany. It’s an album that mixes up elements of both psychedelia and electronica. It seems to flit quite happily between the two with the Coil-like sound of the first track Induction being able to sit quite comfortably with the more ambient psychedelic Yaldaboath. There are moments when it occasionally slips into slight dullness. A Call To Cats on the mMoon is one of these moments. Rather sparse synth noises that do sound like cats, and a dull repetitive thud, might have worked well as a band in joke at the time but doesn’t really do much for the album.

The band is apparently a great live act surrounding themselves with banks of synths. And you can see from this album that their strength lies in the electronica tracks. You could see those sounding really good pumping out through a large sound system as people danced around to it. The moments where they go off into other realms such as the previously mentioned A Call To Cats on the mMoon and the final track Shadow Out (a rather dull industrial sounding piece) could be left out and would have made this a more complete sounding album.