Thursday, November 20, 2008

Zomes

So I wrote to the PR guy at Holy Mountain to ask exactly what instruments are played on this really, quite good, trippy, mesmeric solo album from Asa Osbourne. The liner notes are, to put it kindly, terse. And this PR guy says, well, you're the writer. What does it sound like? And I said, fine, it sounds like baritone sax, is that okay with you? But really it doesn't...Here's my Dusted review, up today.


Zomes
Zomes
Holy Mountain

Zomes, in case you didn’t know, are structures built out of non rectangular polyhedrons – like triangles, pentagons, hexagons and so on. The best-known one is Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, but you can build one yourself, any time. There’s a company in Colorado that sells Zomes kits for children as young as seven.


More to the point, Zomes is also a musical project from Lungfish guitarist Asa Osborne. It’s not clear, actually, what the link is between Zomes and Zomes, or whether Osbone has spent time with the color coordinated dowels and sockets of polyhedral construction. (He is a visual artist, so you can’t rule it out.) However, it seems just barely possible to make a connection. This sound is droning and fuzzy, certainly, without the hard geometrical edges that you might expect. Yet it is built out of small, irregular musical ideas, repeated kaleidoscopically and creating vast, improbable constructions of light and tone.

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4 comments:

Syd The Squid said...

after reading that i'm really looking forward to listening to this... job done then!

jenniferpkelly said...

Oh, thanks, I want one of those Zomes kits, too.

Ian said...

I liked this. Kind of reminded me of early Charalambides, minus the vocals.

jenniferpkelly said...

It reminded me a bit of Human Bell, which makes sense since nathan bell was in Lungfish as well. I listened to this over and over again without really getting tired of it. It's getting crazy play on WFMU, which is always a good sign.

Ian, are you doing the Christina Carter for PopMatters? Did you like it? (I really liked it.)