Given all the discussion and debate around artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of art, culture, employment and humanity itself, releasing a record that explores “the relationship between humans and machines, tradition and progress” could either be seen as apposite or painfully on the nose.
Rather than any sort of exploration of AI – either thematic, or as a collaborative tool – Osmium instead construct the machines they need before going about bending them to their collective will. Using bespoke and homemade instrumentation, the quartet craft something dark, ominous and entirely unique: a glowering landscape that’s teeming with worshipful human life while also pockmarked with mines and smoke-spewing factories whose gears never once stop turning.
The players here all have form when it comes to sculpting abstract, innovative, biomechanical sounds. Composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir won an Oscar for her Joker score, crafted the industrialised sonics for HBO’s feted Chernobyl series and has collaborated with the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Pan Sonic and Sunn O))). Her husband, Sam Slater, is also part of the group: he regularly works alongside Guðnadóttir, and is himself a producer, composer and sound artist. Producer/engineer James Ginzburg is one half of Emptyset, an electronic act that has, in the past, funnelled basic sounds through complex machine learning algorithms to startling effect. Then there’s vocalist Rully Shabara, whose work with experimental act Senyawa defies any sort of categorisation. Here he huffs, harrumphs and ululates, sounding for all the world like another piece of jerry-rigged, circuit-bent equipment that’s been tormented into producing musical sound.
The results are thrillingly alien: the eight pieces thrum and groan, scuttle and lurk, skulking at the edges of industrial, noise and musique concrète. You might be minded of how a Justin Broadrick project might sound if it was somehow recorded by Alan Lomax, or if 1996 Sepultura had leaned fully into their berimbau excursions and released an instrumental record via Thrill Jockey.
Despite the technological gulf separating them, there’s also something here that speaks to the ritual sounds of Wardruna, Heilung and Nytt Land: ancient, hymnal qualities that seem to have been dredged up from some deep, barely-known place. For all the scrapes and judders, it’s these elements that elevate Osmium’s work beyond the merely curious and propel it into the downright compelling: the ability to corral these strange mechanical sounds and wring from them something primally, achingly human.
