OPLA — GTI

Opla is an experimental duo with releases dating back to 2019.  Their new cassette album, GTI, is a deeply psychedelic freeform art rock release with its roots in the original boom of creative inspiration in the 70s for krautrock and jam bands, flavoured with nods to newer technologies and styles.  It's a concise thirty-three-minute recording, with six pieces three- eight minutes in length.

Generally keeping outside the confines of rigid meter, there is certainly a tonality to this improvisational performance, rooted in the blues scales from which rock originally emerged and with influence from ambient and Berlin school.  In true krautrock fashion, when there is a beat, it serves as a vehicle to carry a whorl of freeform ambience.  Whimsical scalar soliloquys from the guitar are combined with heavy glitch, delay and repeater effects and dissociated 808s.  The end of the second track becomes almost like dub, as the halftime pulse drags ever more sluggish and falls into delayed obliteration.

Moving into the third piece, there are subtle electronic textures I might expect to hear in modern digital IDM or glitchy art ambient from a label like 12k.  Sounding almost completely analog up to this point, the recording is gradually revealing a rich variety of sound sources.  In this track, the guitar is processed with a dissonant harmonizer and ran through a circular stereo delay, and finally complimented with rapid tapping arpeggios from a mallet instrument.  The silvery, shimmery celestial texture created by the soft shifting digital clicks and pops is quite pleasant.  The effect is surreal and transcendent not unlike artists such as CoH, Coil, or Nurse With Wound.

Again showing their classic influences, the guitarist opens the fourth piece ("LOP") with a ripping surf guitar tremolo through a heavy delay.  This soon becomes to combine with granular scambling in a curious way, with the original sound of the instruments becoming nearly unrecognizable in a dubby cascade of rhythmic delays.  I'm reminded of Vladislav Delay's smeared, deconstructed beats, and highly textural, nearly arrhythmic take on dub music.

This is a lovely and subtle release, with constant attention paid to a gradual and graceful shifting of colour, mood and tone.  Rock influences are woven seamlessly into sections of deconstructed chillout electronica and psychedelic musique concrete, with very precise use of gestural sounds, and impeccable mixing.  It achieves a tasteful balance of elements in a way that many of the highly experimental 70's recordings did not.  Within a sound such as this, genres and styles seem to become colours to be used by the paintbrush, introduced whenever it feels appropriate.