Ovro "Malice in Underland" CD
[Some Place Else]
Experimental electronics from this one-woman project out of Finland, using lots of quiet, generally subdued textures with fluttering, garbled motion, and softly narrated/sung vocals. Honestly I'm not too into this kind of stuff, simply because it feels almost too minimal and random to me. There's not really a great deal of feeling conveyed, to me anyway, through the use of these somewhat glitchy, crunchy, sparse sound effects. "Bonfire Story" isn't so bad until the weird barking sounds break in, and that totally kills it for me. I like the reverberated humming in "Ascension", though. That's the first track that sort of suggests a bit more emotion or content, at least based on the sounds rather than the lyrics and such in the booklet alongside the track titles. "Caving" is rhythmic and percussive in a sense, which is something that most of the other tracks lack as far as having an obviously concrete base to the structure. "MindEye" is then similar to "Ascension" with some nice singing tones in the distance, but the helium-like effects on the spoken vocals are too irritating and disruptive to the flow of the piece. The layout contains a lot of brightly saturated colors and clean text that do create an interesting overall image. Inside are brief sets of lyrics that are pretty strange: "An invitation bordering on order to disregard the surface. The body lies and lies. The mind, the spirit, may see beyond it. May, just may." This isn't as interesting as I had initially hoped it would be. The aesthetic of the packaging and everything had me expecting something a bit more involved, but it's not the minimal nature of the work that bothers me so much as the fact that it's minimal in an ineffective and borderline boring manner. I think there are a lot of ideas and pieces that could be worked into more effective wholes, but that's just not what the end result turns out to be here. (5/10)
Running time - 34:00, Tracks: 8
[Notable tracks: Ascension]
Some Place Else - http://www.someplaceelse.net

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