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Ovro & Niko Skorpio : Live in Placard #7 CD 9.84EUR

One hour of unsettling and unrestrained Uneasy Listening. Recorded live in Placard #7 Headphone Festival, Helsinki, Finland, 22th May 2004. This is musick to shrink skulls to. Edition of 500 copies, hand-numbered by the artists themselves.

Tracklist:
1. Ovro : Pre-Concrete Echoes
2. Ovro : Seconds of Sun Cave Mind Less Fire
3. Ovro : Phased
4. Ovro : First Momentum
5. Ovro : Bonfire of Stories
6. Ovro : Equate
7. Ovro : Differentiate
8. Ovro : It Will Only Hurt a Little
9. SkorpiOvro : Dreams Which Burn
10. Niko Skorpio : Reverse Birth
11. Niko Skorpio : Faceless Lord
12. Niko Skorpio : Liminal Cows
13. Niko Skorpio : Limbo Cut
14. Niko Skorpio : Oskorei (invoking Reptiljan)
15. Niko Skorpio : Reptiljan:All Songs Must Die
16. Niko Skorpio : Reptiljan:Zero Ego
17. Niko Skorpio : That Witch Goes to Heaven


Reviews

”The album contains the solo and combined contributions of Ovro & Niko Skorpio to the Placard Festival. These festivals are only made available on headphones, either by MP3 or live streams over the Internet, to locations either nearby or remote. On this occasion the performance took place in a Helsinki apartment, convenient for the Finnish artists, with listening slots (the "placards") set up in France, Belgium and Italy. Therefore the conditions of its original performance are entirely replicable at home.
Headphone listening greatly heightens awareness of stereo. This is exploited throughout, pre-eminently by using stereo panning with a vigour and agandon rarely heard since the technique's adoption by the mass market. Likewise, radical separation in each channel is often made apparent by rapid on-off sequences.
Ovro's half develops with more convincing aesthetic with these tools. Pre-Concrete Echoes, for example, mixes muted thumps and echoes together with helter skelters of purely electronic and purely synthetic sound. It is like listening to the infrastructure of a building, with wires, pipes, walls and joists conspiratorially crepitating to each other. Over this, Ovro whispers barbed threats in a little girl's voice. It is a piece born to live in the intimacy of the headphones, never taking the listener beyond the space between their ears.
Niko Skorpio's pieces are both more musical and more robust. The collapsing building sounds on Oskorei, or the Eastern wind riff on Liminal Cows, or the recognisable guitar and percussion sounds throughout, take our minds to the source of their creation. The standout track, however, brings both artists together on Dreams Which Burn, a telling title for a piece where Ovro's paranoid and unresolved soundscapes are buffeted by Niko's sonically fiercer leanings to produce a distubingly scorched nightmare.” (The Wire)

“(…)Like I wrote before there are similarities between the sound of Ovro and AGF in a way that both deal with vocals, or maybe rather spoken words. Poetic electronic music. It's hard to decipher what these poems are about, but hearing the somewhat darker undercurrents in her music I bet it's not a happy worldview. The musical setting is mostly on the quieter side of electronics. After her live recording follows an improvised piece with Niko Skorpio, which combines the best of both worlds, but less the vocals.
Niko Skorpio is an established artist on the Some Place Else label, and he uses sampling to a great extend with noise elements and slow rhythms. When Skorpio puts his Reptiljan cap on, things turn grim with a bunch of laptop grindcore. Two examples are enclosed here too. It makes the entire disc into a well-done, well varied bunch of electronic music by two of the more promising artists from Finland.” (Vital Weekly)

“The recording heads off rather calm with Ovro's material, featuring dark minimal low key sounds and noises with on top of it a narrative female voice reciting in a slightly childish fairy-tale way. The music slowly gets more robust during this album. Electronic, psychedelic and mysterious sampled noises form the main core of the music. It's like Alice in Wonderland is communicating with aliens that speak in dark crackles and strange hiss. It's not often one comes across such music, implying the originality of it of course. But the album offers much more, being the output by Niko Skorpio. An unrecognizable voice on top of digital distorted sound bits, creating creepy soundscapes and ominous atmospheres. The last couple of tracks can even be considered feeback noise, reminding of artists such as The Haters or noise without any sign of structure. This is more the territory of one of the other projects called Reptiljan.” (Phosphor Magazine)

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This product was added to our catalog on Friday 22 October, 2004.