OCH is the Swedish word for “and,” a name so ordinary that it becomes strangely suggestive when attached to music this elusive. “And” is not an object or destination. It is the connective tissue between things, the little hinge that allows one condition to open into another. II behaves in exactly that fashion. Its eight pieces rarely settle into fixed identities before discovering another passage, rhythm, temperature or imagined location. One track becomes the corridor leading into the next, and the album gradually feels less like a collection of separate compositions than a transportation system built between incompatible worlds.
This was OCH’s first album for Rocket Recordings, arriving six years after the self-released ETT cassette, and the long interval seems appropriate for a group that initially revealed almost nothing about itself. II emerged as an artifact before OCH became a more legible band, carrying only the knowledge that the anonymous Swedish trio had connections to Flowers Must Die and belonged somewhere within Linköping’s unusually fertile psychedelic underground. That deliberate lack of biography helps the music. Without personalities standing in front of it, the record appears to operate autonomously, a machine discovered already running in an unattended room.
“Jag är här, jag är här,” meaning “I am here, I am here,” begins with the sound of a train and the German transit warning “Zurückbleiben bitte,” immediately placing the listener inside a journey that has already begun. The title insists upon presence while the music makes stable presence nearly impossible. Feedback gathers, the rhythm locks into forward motion, and a dark repeated figure supplies the sensation of travelling through illuminated stations without leaving the carriage. The motorik pulse is recognizable, but OCH do not treat it as a historical costume borrowed from seventies Germany. They understand its psychological function: repetition can make movement feel stationary and stillness feel impossibly fast. The train travels forward while the mind circles in place.
“Baum Baur” changes the scenery without stopping the trip. Tabla- and sitar-like colors enter the rhythmic field, but the piece does not announce a decorative excursion into vaguely defined Eastern mysticism. These sounds are used as additional surfaces within OCH’s shifting construction, another set of materials passing through the album’s circuitry. Echo around the drums creates a humid, enclosed atmosphere, while the guitar eventually pulls the music back toward something earthier and less ceremonial. The track feels assembled from fragments collected in different countries and decades, yet the seams remain visible. OCH’s psychedelic language depends upon those seams. The music is most alive when its components do not entirely agree about where they belong.
“Åkkså” drifts further from recognizable ground. Repeating electronic tones, sustained textures and gradually intensifying noise create a sense of isolation that is not empty so much as overextended. Space expands beyond a comfortable human scale, leaving the rhythm and recurring figures to act as navigational markers. OCH are especially good at allowing a repeated sound to change meaning without significantly changing shape. What first appears calm can become ominous simply because it has continued longer than expected. A modest pulse becomes an alarm; an atmospheric tone acquires weight; an apparently open landscape starts to resemble an enclosure.
The low frequencies of “Den såmm bor i Tarim” bring another transformation. Bass and fuzz thicken the air, replacing the abstraction of “Åkkså” with a slower physical threat. The title appears to point toward the distant Tarim region, yet the music refuses the clarity of geographic illustration. It sounds less like arrival in a known place than a transmission received from one. Reverberation makes every gesture feel partially concealed, as though the source remains somewhere behind the sound. II repeatedly uses place names and cultural references this way. They are not explanations. They are coordinates entered into faulty equipment, producing destinations that may never have existed.
“Färgen ur rymden,” literally suggesting a color arriving from space, is the album’s shortest piece and one of its most necessary. After the density of the preceding tracks, it opens a pale clearing where drones and electronic residue can hover without being driven forward. The title carries an inevitable echo of cosmic horror, but OCH’s treatment is subtler than a soundtrack for an approaching monster. The disturbance is color itself, something perceived but difficult to name, entering ordinary space and quietly altering it. The track changes the listener’s scale of attention. Instead of waiting for an event, we begin examining the atmosphere for evidence that an event has already occurred.
That suspended condition flows directly into “Pelennor’s fält,” whose title relocates Tolkien’s Pelennor Fields into Swedish grammar. The literary reference might suggest heroic spectacle, but OCH approach the field after mythology has loosened from its story. A quasi-folk opening establishes a distant pastoral mood before drums begin carrying the piece with renewed force. Organ and guitar rise around the rhythm until the track feels both celebratory and damp, a procession crossing land that remembers violence beneath its greenery. The composition joins two impulses that often remain separated in psychedelic music: the pastoral desire to return to something ancient and the electronic desire to leave the human world altogether.
“Nu:64” pulls the album toward another kind of imagined future. The title resembles an obsolete model number or the surviving label on a forgotten machine, and the music answers with one of the record’s most compact unions of propulsion and electronic strangeness. A firm groove moves beneath synthesizer tones that seem to blink, scan and transmit. OCH’s technology never sounds clean or newly manufactured. It has dust in its switches and unstable current passing through its wiring. Even when the group approaches science-fiction music, the future appears to have been constructed from secondhand equipment found in a rural storage building. That mixture of technological imagination and handmade imperfection gives II much of its personality.
Then comes “Pandemi på Händelö,” a title that became unnervingly well timed. Händelö is an island and industrial district outside Norrköping, known for its interdependent system of energy production, manufacturing and recycled industrial resources. OCH transform this specific local environment into the location of an unnamed outbreak. The album was released on February 28, 2020, less than two weeks before the World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. There is no need to turn the coincidence into prophecy. Its accidental precision is already strange enough. A record concerned with transit systems, interconnection, invisible transmissions and unstable environments ended with a pandemic at a local industrial network just as the actual world was preparing to close its doors.
Musically, “Pandemi på Händelö” refuses to become a solemn prediction. It is animated, urgent and oddly melancholy, driven by rhythms that seem increasingly unable to contain all the activity around them. Earlier tracks moved through uncertainty with a degree of patience; here the system begins showing stress. Sounds overlap, momentum accelerates, and the careful travelogue threatens to scatter into fragments. Yet the piece never collapses into indiscriminate noise. The trio keeps enough structure intact to make the instability perceptible. Disorder requires a surviving measure of order, just as a machine must continue operating long enough for us to hear it malfunction.
The album’s physical presentation strengthened its identity as a mysterious discovered object. Rocket issued it as LAUNCH180 in an edition of 350 fluorescent-yellow and black-splattered records, with artwork credited to label co-founder Chris Reeder and mastering by James Plotkin. Plotkin’s long experience with heavy, experimental and electronically saturated music makes particular sense here. II requires clarity without domestication. Its bass and drums need physical force, but the drones, field recordings and small electronic disturbances must remain separate enough to preserve the sensation of several realities occupying the same room.
Compared with Pö om pö, the OCH album that followed in 2022, II feels more restless and externally directed. Pö om pö moves inward, gradually accumulating detail within a hypnagogic state. II is the journey before sleep, when trains, games, literature, industrial landscapes, remembered recordings and intrusive thoughts continue flashing behind the eyes. Its transitions suggest stations on a route, but the route does not form a sensible map. Berlin transit audio leads toward imagined deserts, cosmic contamination, Tolkien’s battlefield, outdated technology and finally an industrial island under quarantine. The logic is associative rather than geographic, resembling the way unfamiliar music can connect memories and ideas that had never previously occupied the same conscious space.
This is also why the familiar references surrounding OCH never fully account for the record. Popol Vuh, Guru Guru, Heldon, Lard Free, Träd Gräs Och Stenar and Älgarnas Trädgård all provide useful entrances, but II does not remain inside any one inherited style. OCH understand that experimental tradition is not a museum of recognizable sounds. It is permission to create relationships that did not previously exist. German repetition can encounter Swedish pastoralism, synthesizers can coexist with field recordings and folk shadows, and science-fiction machinery can be powered by drums that feel physical, communal and ancient.
II lasts only about forty minutes, yet it leaves behind the impression of a much larger structure. Each track opens a temporary chamber, and each chamber contains another doorway before the listener has finished examining it. The album never provides a final answer to the question announced by “Jag är här, jag är här.” Where exactly is “here”? Inside a train, an invented landscape, an industrial complex, a record groove, a historical lineage, or the changing electrical activity of the listener’s own mind? OCH’s answer is contained in their name. Here is never one thing. It is this and that and whatever enters next.
Anyone familiar with the Linköping and Norrköping scenes, the Flowers Must Die connection, Händelö, or the stranger meanings concealed inside these titles is encouraged to add what they know. OCH created an album filled with coordinates, but they wisely neglected to supply the complete map.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.