Album Review: OMMU

There’s a self-deprecating joke about jazz that goes something like “the people who have the most fun at jazz gigs are the people on the stage.” It probably goes for any genre where the objective of the music is artistry and experimentation rather than an overt attempt to just entertain – meaning that almost any kind of music, other than pure pop, is prone to the criticism: those lazy and clichéd put downs like the music being “self-indulgent,” “pretentious,” or worst of all “depressing.”

“That’s pretentious, self-indulgent and narcissistic shite!”

I don’t buy it. To me one of the most entertaining forms of music, whatever the style, is the experimental, spontaneous, improvised stuff of the form that Ōtepoti Dunedin band OMMU have begun creating. OMMU are Craig Monk (Mink, Cloudboy, Heka) on guitar and keys, Jeff Harford (Bored Games, The Rip, Valve, The Broken Heartbreakers) on drums and Tenzin Mullin (Suka, Heka, Jay Clarkson & the Containers) on bass.

This is improvised psych-rock and garage-prog – six tracks spanning more than 50 minutes, each an improvised instrumental. These range from mid-tempo driving psych rock of the opening Hemispheric, through the melodic Southerly, the ambient soundscapes, free time, rattling and distortions of Otic, through to the vast, dynamic and hypnotic centrepiece Planetary – a 15-minute odyssey in the true spirit of psychedelic experimentation. It’s a moody, slow-form piece, like the film score to a mushroom trip in a dank Dunedin basement. It’s like a soundtrack to violent thoughts that can’t be controlled – grinding, distorted bass from Mullin, sparse and downbeat drums from Harford, with endless guitar solos ranging from the spacious and shapeless through to intense and relentless, one merging into the other, as if we are riding though some huge and shapeless imaginary landscape. This is great stuff that I found myself listening to over and over. It invites engagement with its details but also could be that noise-blocking soundtrack to whatever part of life requires it – music to listen to while you drink or smoke yourself silly, write your overdue assignments, or lose yourself in thought and imagination.

The danger, of course, is that this sort of music ends up sounding like blokes making noise for the sake of themselves, full of overblown technical indulgences but possessing no dynamic structure, no shape or form – so it ends up, like the cliché says, mostly fun for them. In a sense, so what if it does? In this case, it’s nothing of the sort. I wondered how many fantastic takes of these tracks, how many versions, how many hours of recordings were made down on Vogel Street (I imagine, recorded on Tuesday nights in the flat above the comic shop) – how much fun was had experimenting and creating – before these 50-odd minutes were selected as those to put out to the public.

They constitute a great choice and showcase one form of music that is perhaps all too rare – records of experiments that worked. Try for yourself and indulge. You might just find it as much fun as OMMU did.