Ohr Hiemis - Opal Spine

"Opal Spine" on 12" 180g black vinyl.

First experimental electronics album from composer Augustin Braud; four contemporary pieces melting organic and industrial sounds.

Ohr Hiemis (winter sun) is the most autonomous means of expression of composer, researcher and multi-instrumentalist Augustin Braud, who has collaborated with some of the most prestigious French and international groups dedicated to the music of our time. On this first album, Braud synthesizes written and improvised material as well as minutious sampling of his own contemporary works through six intertwined pieces structured around modular synthesizer processing as much as over-saturated guitars, mixing venomous experimental noise instilled from the blackest nadir to a rigorous acousmatic constructivism.

Opal Spine is a collection of four pieces, referencing both the composers’ mother health issues linked to the weakness of her spine, as well as the fragile balance between organicity and the ever-growing constructivism of our society. Setting the tone with a musical reading of Celan's Psalm (No one incants our dust), the album culminates to a collapsing void as the only emanation of Braud’s vocals — a remnant of humanity inside the absolute numeric simulacra — chant those hopeless words inspired by Kazuo Shiraga’s art : « Lower than the ground, the Hydra drags me back to myself ».

At the junction of the years 2022 and 2023, Braud experimented the transition between a mostly rural area and Paris, taking with him only a few personal effects and a reduced number of instruments. The result is a compilation of snapshots of materials that become pieces in their own right through a process of itinerant sedimentation, attempts at instrumental appropriation as much as a fantasized mooring to a future home. Between evanescence and inertia, the transhumance towards a new place of life becomes a catachrony, a suspended moment between two spaces and simultaneous temporalities. This diffuse space-time accompanying the passing from one home to another can then be experienced as a space of creation in spite of its inscription in surveillance capitalism.

Those six pieces scream negentropy to the face of an over-saturated world, merging radical amounts of distortion with gentle harmonium or analog synths pads to deconstruct itself from the 4K ultra-definition of our physical worlds. By gleaning musical materials, quasi-field-recordings of his wanderings, sound traces of fugues forward, Braud tried to accomplish his own dehiscence by bursting his singularity in multiple sensitive fragments in order to ally the essence and revenance of the spanned places.