OSMIUM stretches the concept of a band to its furthest limits. They fit the traditional description of a small group of artists creating music together under one name — but nothing else about this collaboration is at all conventional.
Three of the four members — the lauded experimental musicians Hildur Guðnadóttir, Sam Slater, and James Ginzburg — built their own instruments for the ambient project. Slater crafted a self-oscillating drum with a feedback system developed with the Berlin-based instrument manufacturer, KOMA Elektronik. Ginzburg designed an apparatus that expands upon an ancient stringed instrument called the monochord. Guðnadóttir uses the Halldorophone, which combines her primary instrument of cello with an attachment that catalyses feedback from the strings and outputs it into a new sound.
The band’s vocalist, Rully Shabara, is being studied by an Indonesian university because he can make sounds with his voice that humans aren’t supposed to be able to make.
Last, but not at all least, there is a fifth member of the band: a set of robotic beaters playing the custom instruments through automation.
“You’ve got a mechanically sequenced band. If we step away from our instruments, they’re just going to sit there and play,” Slater says. “A conversation that we’ve kind of jokingly had is that it’s better to be friends with the robots.”
Through their individually impressive careers, the members of OSMIUM have certainly befriended technology. Ginzburg is a member of the multiplatform art project Emptyset and the boss of the electronic label Subtext Recordings. Slater and Guðnadóttir, as husband and wife, have created experimental synthetic music for various projects, including video games such as Battlefield 2042 and television programs such as Chernobyl.
OSMIUM is the next phase of their experimental journey, and the latest instance of being surprised by music.
“You could actually make a project entirely based on a ‘What if’?’” Slater says.
“It’s always really exciting when you stumble upon a new process, or even a new set of sonic relationships that create something unexpected,” Ginzburg adds. “Obviously, as time goes on, it becomes more challenging to be surprised by music and sound. But that doesn’t stop us from having that spirit of exploration. Creating situations where unexpected things can happen is the primary interest in approaching projects like this.”
That situation is built around OSMIUM’s robotic counterpart. Slater and Guðnadóttir had experimented with automated mechanical beaters in previous works. For OSMIUM, they refined the process with the other members, using the patterns to create the traditional idea of a piece of music. The way the beaters engage with the instruments is consistent for every performance because Ginzburg, Slater, and the other members program the sequences in advance.
As this robotic framework performs the pieces, all of the instrumentalists engage with their instruments individually to expand upon the piece. They create a conversation within their own mechanical sequences and with each other, almost like a jam. Then, Shabara contributes his intriguing and almost inhuman vocal tones.
“You can play counter rhythms or you can not play at all. Each one of those ways of agitating the strings creates a different outcome as it interacts,” Ginzburg says. His reimagined monochord is a stringed instrument, and so he has the option to play with bows or his beaters. “I can bow while it hammers. If I hit something, and then the hammer hits it, that mutes what I just hit. So you get very, very strange interactions happening.”
“Honestly, there are points where I can’t really add anything,” Slater continues. “As musicians, we come along and join in. We try and affect what’s going on. We alter the dialogue, we add counter rhythms. We might play along the same rhythm as the machine and enjoy the fact that humans are just shitter than the mechanized thing.”
The result of this amalgamation of musical conversations is a mass of clanging, scratching, rhythmic noises and enduring ominous tones. When listening to a recording, it’s unclear at any point which member is making any particular sound. Each instrument is generating its own sonics while also creating feedback at various frequencies. According to Slater, audience members have come close to vomiting during OSMIUM performances because of resonant feedback at low frequencies around 30 Hz.
“In this whole project, there are two quite strong variables. One is the ability to deal with chaos. We have live feedback from instrument to instrument going on, and the only thing that is guaranteed is the hammers are going to come down at the same time,” Slater says. “You have a really rigid structure on one side, and you have chaos on the other side. You have to be quite a specific kind of musician to enjoy that process.”
When it was time to record their debut, self-titled album, they used the same specific process. Slater, Ginzburg, and Guðnadóttir visited a studio called Bunello in Berlin and set up their instruments to track live, capturing the musical conversations in the moment. Each instrument has its own direct input, and they also populated the space with room mics to balance the individual sounds with the combined sounds.
They set aside three days for recording, but, unfortunately, Guðnadóttir’s Haldorophone “blew up” on the first day. With the time it took to get hold of a new one, they ended up only having one full day for instrumental tracking.
Shabara was in Indonesia during this session, so Ginzburg recorded him at a later date in his home studio. Ginzburg used multiple mics, distortion chains, and “exotic” compression in processing. To maintain the conversational dynamic of the group, Ginzburg set up multiple reverb returns that he would adjust while Shabara was vocalising. Essentially, he was performing the mix in response to Shabara’s foreboding noises.
“It was very intense because when he gets into it, he goes somewhere else,” Ginzburg says of Shabara. “I followed him, and then you sort of snap out of it and you’re like, ‘Oh, I guess we should go eat some noodles or something.’”
To finish off the recordings, they edited down the raw takes into listenable sections and implemented automation to let different sounds move through the background and foreground. For the final, granular mixing process, they approached it similarly to how Ginzburg recorded Shabara: adjusting parallel processing in the moment to perform the mix.
“Everything can have some kind of organic interactions imprinted on them ex post facto,” Ginzburg says.
“Organic” is an interesting word given the highly mechanical nature of OSMIUM. But these four experimentalists prove that no matter how advanced or idiosyncratic technology becomes, humans can harness it into something new and exciting.
The post “It’s better to be friends with the robots,” OSMIUM on jamming with robots for their debut album appeared first on MusicTech.
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