Description
The second in the series of releases called ‘A Tension of Opposites’. Contains 86 minutes of completely new music, effectively two albums in one. Housed in dual colour black and white shell, with folded Maltese cross packaging, full colour design printed on uncoated 240gsm card, inside and out. This edition is a complement to ‘A Tension of Opposites Volumes 1 & 2’ and is limited to 300 copies. Includes a download code.
Two years after the first two volumes of A Tension of Opposites (ATOO) were issued OYC return to the form they created to house their looser more exploratory works. ATOO allows them to expand their musical horizons and release their music more expediently.
The original ATOO was born out of 2020’s virus state where both OYC members were left working in isolation. Two types of music emerged spontaneously, and rather than try to combine them OYC decided to present the results separately, two sides of a contrasting whole.
In need of a suitable format and frustrated by their usual lengthy release schedules, OYC returned to the quick and dirty compact cassette – the place they started back in the 80s.
ATOO is ‘Dirty Ambient’, a phrase coined by OYC for the process of working quickly and instinctively, embracing errors and honouring imperfections. It’s also a jibe at what is sometimes a hideously manicured genre.
Released April 12, 2023
Mastered – Colin Potter: IC Studio, London
Design – Stuart Hardie
1. Deep Head Scene
2. Hidden Cities
3. Pleasured
4. Ocean of Forgetting
5. Abandonment (parts 1-4)
6. Volte
7. One Eighty 03:21
8. Switcheroo
9. Doubleback
10. U-ey
11. Returning
12. A Change of Heart
13. Second Thoughts
14. Flip Flop
15. Regress
16. Inversion
Volume 3:
‘A World Without Zeros’
Tracks 1 – 5 by Andrew Hulme (Hull & London 2021-2022, 43 minutes)
Volume 4
‘Inversion’
Tracks 6 – 16 by Roger Horberry, (York 2022, 37 minutes)
with
Joe Lamb – saxophone
Review from Vital Weekly
Now in its 40th year of existence, O Yuki Conjugate is still going strong. Going through various line-ups, but with Roger Horberry and Andrew Hulme as the common thread in their history. Their new cassette is a follow-up to the first instalment of ‘A Tension Of Opposites’ (see Vital Weekly 1275) and the result of working in isolation. The first one was at the height of lockdown and covid, but an idea they liked to repeat. Hume has five pieces on the first side, Horberry ten on the second, and you try to spot the differences in approach and do the maths as the total is the sound of O Yuki Conjugate. They label their music as dirty ambient, which is about the “process of working quickly and instinctively, embracing errors and honouring imperfections. It’s also a jibe at what is sometimes a hideously manicured genre.” It’s easy to hear the typical OYC elements in the music here, the percussion, the bass sounds, the sparse synthesizers, the slightly exotic feeling and the ‘dirty’ elements, a bit of tape hiss, for instance. As before, Horberry likes to keep his pieces short and tends to be rhythmic. Hulme has four shortish pieces and one long piece, and, again, his music is a slightly more abstract ambient drift. Remember that these ‘differences’ aren’t significant, as Hulme’s pieces have a fair share of rhythm, just as Horberry’s music is highly atmospherical. Hulme’s pieces are, perhaps, more a collage of various sounds and textures, generally mixed in a free-floating manner, whereas Horberry’s are kept together and have a song-like structure. Indeed, these approaches make up the music of O Yuki Conjugate. Let me end with the same conclusion as before; you can mistake this for a group effort, which is undoubtedly the point. (Frans de Waard)
