OdNu + Ümlaut — Abandoned Spaces

Abandoned Spaces is a collaborative effort between solo musicians Michel Mazza & Jeff Düngfelder (aka OdNu + Ümlaut), both artists having relocated from their previous NYC climes to the nether reaches of what that everywhere and nowhere moniker, "upstate." The results are spread over eight long tracks – nothing shorter than seven minutes – which do a lot of meandering with sparse instrumentation. And despite the length of each cut, there is surprisingly little development that occurs, each composition moving more circularly than linearly, creating the feeling that we are stuck in a limited sonic equation that is not headed for conclusion or resolution.  

 

The album's opener, "In Numberless Forms", announces the acoustic palette that will be rearranged and re-presented on each of the tracks: pitch-shifted guitar, acoustic bass and drum kit, and the occasional smattering of delay and distortion. While it might at first sound like there is some heavy processing going on, the frequency modulation and filtering are pretty transparent, which I suspect (hope?) is intentional. "Sleepy I Slept" and the album's title track offer brief bass lines, like phrasing, which, like the structural logic of the rest of the instruments, never coalesces into anything that might be accused of resembling a "song". These bare-bones melodies and minimalist rhythms feel stuck, like a car that never gets past first gear, each track an anagram composed of just a few letters. For some, this non-, or anti-developmental character of the compositions that make up Abandoned Spaces will serve as the work's main achievement – lilting melodies set to non-threatening beats in the service of texture more than self-contained wholes.   

 

Fans of Mazza & Düngfelder will certainly recognize the signature approaches of each on Abandoned Spaces, which sits comfortably in a few genres at least – electroacoustic ambient with a sunny disposition, new jazz, and long-form improv – along with others, I am sure. The internal development of a song can be stymied, through reduction and repetition, which OdNu + Ümlaut prove over and over again. To find out more