STM 295 - O/H

O/H (Ontario Hospital) is a duo consisting of Dave Foster and Richard Oddie, two artists who have greatly influenced the course of underground electronic music over the past few decades. While Foster’s projects Teste, Perceptrons, and Huren consistently changed the perception of how techno could sound—infusing it with the immediacy and violent bareness of industrial and noise—Oddie’s work, both solo and with Orphx or Oureboros, took a more refined yet equally experimental direction, evolving from rhythmic noise to disturbing, harshly rich, and ominous forms of techno. O/H merges the artists’ distinctive styles and similar roots into a restive combo of sleazy industrial, EBM, boundless exploration, and vicious spoken word that confronts the ugliest realities of human existence. Like their individual projects, O/H is always expanding. Last year’s Market Values release on Ron Morelli’s L.I.E.S. brought even grittier textures and vocal variations, as well as a ludic note to their social commentary that also stretches to this peculiar mix they have composed for our listening (dis)pleasure.

STM 295 eschews the usual rules of structure, resulting in a collage of impressions and sonic scenes rather than a classic electronic mix—which only makes it more thrilling. O/H themselves described this piece as “a third-generation mixtape of teenage dreams and nightmares,” and for good reason. Its atmosphere almost recreates the experience of watching Greg Araki’s early-90s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, or the cruelty of other cult classics that examine the dramatic, honest vulnerability of (juvenile) rage and isolation in a senseless, fucked-up world through suitably extreme and idiosyncratic aesthetics. The mix itself opens with the “See You in Pittsburgh” excerpt from Videodrome and continues with scenes from The Driller Killer, The Shining, Blue Velvet, Persona, and Cannibal Holocaust emerging between the cracks of equally dirty, emotionally charged music.

Although many of the featured tracks date from the ’80s and ’90s, their warped arrangement and interaction with film excerpts create the impression of a spaced-out, vivid narrative that doesn’t belong to any specific period: the world was always like this. And there was always music that could confront, unmask, or obscure it—from Totalitär’s frantic thrashing to Ice-T’s verbose assaults to the sheer raw darkness of Nurse With Wound—which appears in an irregular sequence through the first half of the mix.

The second part of the mix is a bit more fluid. The Calico Wall’s psychotic confession “I’m a Living Sickness” blends with The Klinik’s “Cold as Ice,” continuing with the piercing noise of SPK and Maska Genetik’s severe yet hypnotic track “Erste Stunde.” There are many more classics worth mentioning—GZA, Mayhem, and Haus Arafna—fusing with “Asylum” by ’70s punk band Crass for a furious battle cry closing the mix. With STM 295, O/H once again unearths the anesthesia of the current, where the world is observed and consumed through the screen, and contrasts it with an oversaturated image of its own monstrosity. The results truly are thrilling.

Late night broadcast from the reality asylum. A third generation mix tape of teenage dreams and nightmares, hallucinatory memories, pure acid hell.