OCH - Pö om Pö

The fascination with Nordic bands keeps the fire burning at Rocket Recordings, where for about a decade now some of Europe's finest psychedelic experiences have been produced. A couple of years ago the British label got its hands on the debut of the Linköping trio OCH, made up of Lars Hoffsten, Martin Daun and Fredrik Ilmarson.

Hoffsten and Daun are also members of Flowers Must Die, a band on the Rocket Recordings roster, to whom the two had entrusted OCH's "II", which broke the silence following the band's only EP, released in 2013, "ETT" ("one").

Staying true to Scandinavian laconicism, "Pö om Pö" ("little by little") is also executed with Teutonic rigor: instrumentals that forge possible meeting points between '70s psychedelia, kraut in the vein of Popul Vuh, Guru Guru and Cluster, and the American subculture of DIY ambient tapes from the 2000s (Sun Araw, Bitchin' Bajas, Magic Lantern). The watchword, then, is hypnagogia, reinterpreted through the lens of guitar-driven psychedelia ("Bolid", "Syzygy") or the most stretched-out space-rock ("Silverstjärnan", "Vadstena"), which takes on the shape of a synth-studded motorik ("Isfält"), spills over into proto-industrial grime ("Bråviken"), surrenders to post-apocalyptic primitivism ("Impetus"), or mixes a bit of everything together ("Ochra").

Endowed with great evocative power, OCH know how to reinterpret the Scandinavian psychedelic tradition, updating it for the present day: debris and shards of different genres and styles pour into a dark, minimal sound that is nonetheless dense with expressiveness and reference points. Behind so much glacial coldness, the music of OCH communicates more than it seems to.

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27/05/2022