Escape is the efforts of a 26-year old Angelo-Italian composer who records under
the three-letter moniker OTX. Suffused with his fascination with cinema and soundtrack work, Escape plays out like the musical accompaniment to a Terry Gilliam or Ridley Scott version of the near future. Shot through with elements of dark ambience, heavy percussion, flirtations with IDM signal processing and the sweaty dance floors of underground urban clubs, Escape can very easily be heard as just that: an escape from the norms, an adventure into a world lit by the saturated colors of heavily-filtered cinema.
A single voice runs through “The Dark Voices of Angels,” softly lamenting the single line of text which it has on its lips. Glass fractures in the background and tiny metal shards tap together over a propulsive beat pattern. It’s a solitary ride across the empty miles of late night highways that bisect modern cities, the yellow and blue flash of city lights a rhythmic pattern across the rain-dappled windshield. It’s introspection at the last hour of night when we are all tired and lonely enough that we can imagine that our pleas will be responded to by the voices of angels.
The martial rhythm of “Calls of the Middle-East” move us faster through these imagined urban landscapes. The lone voice ululating in the background is a call to the wilderness, a tugging insistence that we turn towards the west and the rising sun. “Creatures of the Darkness” is surprisingly light, filled with analog synth tones like a sweeping Pete Namlook anthem. The monsters lurking here are restricted to rumbling in the background as transitory breaths of black mist and their claws are but tiny knives that dance and caper like chipmunk rhythms.
“Medieval Heresy” brings modern squelch and noisy detritus to the crusades of the 12th century. Very much a score for a Luc Besson-lensed chronicle of the Cross waving and Crescent shaking that went down on the desert plains of the Middle East, “Medieval Heresy” blends the right touch of field recordings, haunted choruses and electronically augmented percussion. The electronics are taken up a few notches in “Weapons Factory,” a floor-burner of a trance track augmented by radio transmissions from the International Space Station and bursts of super-heated steam.
Escape makes me wish I had a digital video camera. OTX has a deft hand at bringing some new sounds and structures to the basic genre trappings and his “soundtrack” work generates all manner of expressive footage in my head. This begs to be attached to a Koyaanisqatsi-esque videologue of the modern human urban experience. Very nice.
Escape is out now on Brume Records.
