Osmium is a feral collision of tribal, guttural, thrash, industrial, and grindcore elements—chaotic, hypnotic, and unrelenting. Featuring Hildur Guðnadóttir, Rully Shbara, James Ginzburg, and Sam Slater, it’s a global sonic ritual that feels like a Dionysian descent into madness. Fourth World music for the damned: raw, electrifying, and anything but safe.
Garbled rage and perfectly composed insanity
Is tribal-guttural-thrash-post-industrial-hypnotic-grindcore to annihilate your mind a musical genre? If not it should be. I don’t know if that is what this is, but its something different, that’s for sure. They call it world music, but its not for the faint of heart. Not for the time when you need to chill out or decompress—unless you decompress through releasing a stream of garbled rage and perfectly composed insanity, channeled with utter care and perfection.
I feel like I am in some kind of chaotic Dionysian ritual in a cave when I listen to this. It’s so unhinged. The beats of dreams and the steady thrum of the cello keep me glued into an almost murderous-sacrificial psychosis. If it isn’t actually violent, it is at the very least cathartic, and makes me feel like all those Black Metal up in Scandinavia need to up there game. That stuff doesn’t sound heavy or black anymore. This though? Yeah, and then some.
I did mention Scandinavia right? This does feature Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir. The first thing you notice is the cello. It’s taut strings are like a garrote or a booby trap. They are there to snag you. Then the vocals come in. They are frenzied, and only relent into overtone throat singing style by the end of the second long track, before gathering a cacophonous head of steam again, unleashed and unfurled as powerful as anything running on coal and made in the steam. By this time I’ve already been brainwashed by the sonic destruction. The noise has enveloped me and I am at the mercy of these captors, who have prepared a web for me to get trapped inside. It’s sticky. Those vocalizations come from Rully Shbara, a South Asian underground artist.
Nothing docile is going on here ::
England’s James Ginzburg, and Sam Slater a Brit based in Berlin join with electronics. This really is global music. World music at its best. None of that commercial Putumayo crap to be found in some bland coffee chain. The world is a dangerous place and this album is dangerous. Safety isn’t all its cracked up to be anyway. There is only docility in playing it safe all the time. Nothing docile is going on here. Nothing to just coast with. This is for action.
Is this what Jon Hassell had in mind when he had the idea for Fourth World music? If you consider that one definition of that is, “combining traditional non-European musical forms with electronic sounds and avant-garde elements to create a culturally hybrid sound… it aims to transcend geographical and stylistic boundaries, blending primitive and futuristic elements,” than I think they nailed it right here on this record. And made that palatable for fans of metal, punk, and noise.
Extended vocal techniques and cello join together in some underground reverberant space to create a chamber music for the damned, accentuated by electronic tones whose organic granularity belie their electric origin. That’s the experimental part of the equation. It’s avantagrade but there is nothing stuffy or academic about it. This music will find your jugular and take a bite.
I hope Osmium will kidnap me again with future releases, and take me down the spiral staircase into dimly world where ashes swirl from bonfires at night and the cold stars shine on us totally unconcerned.
OSMIUM is available on Invada. [Bandcamp]
