
Luah – Ocean O. (home 4 the holidays)
How much time can you allow yourself to spend on a memory? If you’re one of the modern people just trying to get through your day, unfortunately, the answer is that there ain’t much time to spare for any time dedicated to yourself. If you’re one of the maniacs who buys guides about how to optimise your time, you won’t be spending any time on memories for the next five years or so.
Slowing down, taking stock and maybe even dropping a tear or two in the process feels less natural than it ever did. You don’t need no expert telling you about how high exposure to screen time or the microplastics are rotting your brain. You should be able to tell that just by taking a long look at yourself and the people you know. But, if you do manage to trick your brain long enough that you can stop and spend some time on a memory, things can change.
Memories aren’t forever, regardless of what you may have heard. They need to be nurtured. Sacrifices are involved. And they might even give you a hard time whenever you open them up. Luah’s “Ocean O. (home 4 the holidays)” is a remarkable recording, a daring dance with memories, a ghostly recording. It requires silence and attention, and holding your breath might not be the worst idea. That’s because it is something that can only happen once, and it’s not the kind of thing that your phone camera can properly capture.
Osti – The Different Man
What use is all the greatest musical equipment in the world if there are no songs worth recording? What good is learning all the scales if there are no songs worth writing with them? And, surely, if everyone had all of these things in great abundance, all of the world’s songs, would end up sounding the same and being about the very same things.
If you’re a music fan, you may be familiar with the explosion of virtuoso guitar music of the 1980s. Around that period, thousands and thousands of guitarists invested time in learning the most cutting-edge techniques and spent their paycheques on buying the best equipment. In the end, nearly every single one of them ending up sounding just the same. In the end, nobody has to listen to more than one of them to make up their mind.
Osti’s “Different Man” sounds like a song that could’ve just as well been played on pots and pans and recorded on an old Walkman. It’d make no difference. The song’s there with all the lines about building up expectations, failing and returning to build some more. The vocals are of a man, I think we can reckon, we might be able to trust. And the lo-fi quality of the recording just adds to the otherworldly nature of the piece. Osti, please don’t ever spend your money on a state-of-the-art recording studio!