OSMIUM share new single “OSMIUM 5” | Debut self-titled album out Friday via Invada records

Credit: Camille Blake

OSMIUM share new single “OSMIUM 5”

Debut self-titled album out Friday via Invada records

Hildur Guðnadóttir / Rully Shabara (Senyawa) / James Ginzburg (Emptyset) / Sam Slater

Ahead of their much-anticipated debut self-titled album, experimental collective OSMIUM have shared a new single titled “OSMIUM 5”. The album is due out this Friday (20th April) via Geoff Barrow’s Invada Records and has already found the outfit on the receiving side of plaudits from the likes of The Needle Drop, Stereogum, The Line Of Best Fit, The Quietus, The Wire, Electronic Sound, Record Collector, MusicTech, and more.

Having previously debuted their material live at Unsound, the group is made up of the Oscar-winning Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, who has recorded with the likes of Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle and Múm, as well as performing live with Sunn O))) and Fennesz. She has composed the scores for, among others, “Chernobyl” and “Tár”, to much critical acclaim. She’s joined in Osmium by Emptyset and Subtext engineer and producer James Ginzburg, Senyawa's idiosyncratic vocalist Rully Shabara and the Grammy-winning sound designer / producer Sam Slater.

Alloying burnished electroacoustic soundscapes with dense, metallic drones, barbed rhythms and buckled, bio-mechanical vocalizations, OSMIUM's debut album doesn't try to cast a rigid future. Rather, it tempers a viscous flow of unorthodox speculations that smolders through the distant past, blazing a trail all the way to the frontier of fate. Absorbed by questions about the relationship between humans and technology, tradition and progression, the individual and the group, OSMIUM channel their experience and expertise into a set of forward-thinking sonic interrogations that skewer established cultural preconceptions. And although genre is acknowledged - the album draws from folk, doom metal, 20th century minimalism, industrial music and extreme noise - there's never a sense that it's riveted firmly in place.

While each member brings along a laundry list of accolades, the project is far greater than the sum of its parts. Widely known for her aforementioned soundtrack work and run of acclaimed solo albums on Touch, Guðnadóttir plays the halldorophone, a unique cello-like electroacoustic instrument designed by Halldór Úlfarsson that allows the performer to harness unstable feedback loops. Taking his cues from this process, Sam Slater - who's worked alongside Jóhann Jóhannsson, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Ben Frost and others - generates rhythms using a self-oscillating drum he custom designed with KOMA Elektronik, and Ginzburg – one half of Emptyset and curator of Subtext Recordings - responds in kind, producing booming tambura-like sonorities from a device he developed himself based on the monocord, an ancient single-stringed resonator.

OSMIUM synchronize the three unique instruments using a custom system of robotics to generate basic rhythms that underpin their improvisations and experiments, and although Shabara just uses his voice, it's his alien tones that supply the band with their conceptual fulcrum. The vocalist is one of South Asia's most recognizable underground artists, and the sounds he's able to create using exhaustively rehearsed extended techniques are so distinctive that he's been studied by scientists back home in Indonesia. As part of OSMIUM, Shabara attempts to merge with the band's machines, warping his vocal cords to mimic the robotics and originate hoarse percussive cracks and eldritch tonalities.

Today’s single, “OSMIUM 5”, sees Ginzburg's staccato monocord hits rushing furiously towards Shabara's wheezing, wordless utterances, criss-crossing with Slater's bouncing syncopations and Guðnadóttir's doomed dissonance. Speaking on the single Ginzburg, says “Osmium 5 is a menacing densely layered hypnotic and driving piece, led with Rully's hypnopompic hallucinatory vocals growling with the insistent intensity of a sleep paralysis demon. Sam's feedback drum and James' bass zither form a frenzied machinic skeleton of the track, while Hildur's serrated haldorophone pulses and swells escape into a climactic finale in which her instrument devours its flesh.”

Never weighed down by needless sound design or modish ornamentation, it's music that feels authentically experimental; OSMIUM have figured out an awkward symmetry between their discrete approaches, concentrating their gaze on the outcome rather than the process. The result is a work of science fiction that's driven by interaction, conversation and sensation.

“OSMIUM” is out 20th June via Invada Records – pre-order HERE

Tracklisting:

1) Osmium 0

2) Osmium 1

3) Osmium 2

4) Osmium 3

5) Osmium 4

6) Osmium 5

7) Osmium 6

8) Osmium 7

OSMIUM is:

Hildur Guðnadóttir - Haldorophone | Rully Shabara - Vocals | Sam Slater - Feedback Percussion James Ginzburg - Bass Monochord