Olive / Owen — 63-66
This is indeed, a formal and mysterious album. To be precise, it’s so formal, that it becomes mysterious. At the risk of exaggeration, the impression given, is of two musicians playing independently of each other, with the results laid side by side, in different channels. Thus, the first two tracks both start with several minutes of silence from one speaker, whilst the other issues forth noises. That should give you a good sense of how formal 63-66 is. The rigid stereo-split also makes it hard to assimilate the two voices being heard, and thus harder to have a firm sense of how they are interacting with each other. Combined with the sounds themselves, this all adds up to a rather alien and ‘hard’ album. The sounds would appear to be created by low-tech electronics and devices - there’s definitely a sense of things being stripped back to the basics. Lots of controlled feedback, drones, clanking, radio bursts, close-up mechanical tampering. It’s almost a true industrial music, with the sounds of factories and production being boiled down to simple elements. It’s very much an album obsessed with texture, and as such does have a restrained, perhaps dour, overall sound, but it would wrong to call it colour-less or dull. In practical terms, each improvisation generally sees each player rigorously working through different blocks of sound, before moving onto another sound, or resting. You could see it as an academic take on junk noise.
I have very mixed feelings about 63-66. It’s a difficult album, and certainly not an easy listen at all. The sounds themselves are often quite beautiful, in a textural sense, and would certainly appeal to fans of HNW, and junk noise. However, their deployment is decidedly user-unfriendly - and yet, it’s precisely this approach that makes the album feel unusual, special. It’s hard to treat the release as background music, the overt formality of it forces the brain to devote attention. To state some grand words, 63-66 is constantly rewarding, but unknowable.