22 April 2006

Ov Biospheres

"It's like... the drums are played on closed eyelids or something."

"_"

"You know what I mean... no bass."

"Or all bass."

"_"



People who work in specialist 'dance' record shops can be hard to like through the eyerolling and sneering and the only one I ever really got on with was a guy in Brighton called Stevo (yeah, I had a go about the o but he wasn't having it - kept pretending it was in honour of the Some Bizarre chap but I knew the truth) who worked in a small, nasty grey shop in the Lanes.

I was living with a beautiful Welsh girl at the time, both of us on the dole and kicking our heels waiting for life to begin (or to end), and so spent most of my time window shopping and volunteering for odd community projects that never quite came off.

For about 6 months I worked as a Samaritan.

Don't laugh.

I probably saved you, fucker.

I didn't have much money and didn't buy many records. It was a period of listening out rather than listening to.

In fact, the only stuff I can remember really listening to during that period of my life was the whole Psychic Warriors Ov Gaia / Exquisite Corpse / Exit 23 axis which seemed to release 12"s that actually seemed a step sideways from the other AI / Intelligent Techno / New Ambient stuff being put out.

Me and Stevo had maybe 9 conversations in the year and a half I lived in Brighton and around 6 or 7 of those were about PWOG. He liked them but was somehow ashamed. I loved them and kept making him order records. We had other crossover points - Black Dog, Autechre, Zoviet France, Global Communication - but the PWOG stuff was our main point of reference, the thing that both of us thought about when I walked into the shop.

I had Maenad and Obsidian from a while back but I'd never noticed how utterly transfixing they were; I guess they'd been swamped by life during University, never really allowed the space to ebb and flow. Like Stevo said: It's like...the drums are played on eyelids or something...

Not really the kind of music that gets heard in a house full of acid monkeys drinking Kestrel Super while developing their own Eco-System.

But away from all that, during what will surely be the quietest period of my life before retirement, the music of the PWOG guys came to life.

I never listen to the brittle true-trance of Obsidian now, never have the time for Exit 23's soft Leary samples, never manage to get all the way through Ov Biospheres And Sacred Grooves or EC's Kupuri or Inner Rhythm or Between Worlds (all Dreammachine music) or any of that stuff because those moments are gone into whirls of kids and work and other noise and to really get these records everything else has to stop.

One day.

Psychic Warriors Ov Gaia - The Tides (They Turn)

A Yousendit Quietude


This track isn't particularly representative of any of their stuff but the world isn't either.

5 comments:

the X said...

Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia:
was it them who did "The Key" --??

(someone played me that once, while we lay on the roof of a Volkswagen bus gazing into a perfect sunset swallowing the ocean in fiery slabs of oranges and reds...
don't even remember what the music was like- drug mind melt- but the musical experience was so intense, PHYSICAL- almost *alive*...)

great stuff...

Loki said...

yeah they did The Key... great track... I think you've hit the nail on the head re: not remembering what the tracks are actually like - they're very contextual, I think I'm gonna leave off actually playing them again until Me and Mrs Loki hit Amsterdam for our 10th (!!!) wedding celebrations... You know the drill; load up an i-pod w/speakers and a shed load of meaningful music from various parts of my life, scoff loads of mushrooms, wash down with a little dope and lie back and bake...

Christ, I feel old...

And Psychbloke, I know: you'll be sick.

dweller said...

I love PWOG,
Ov Biospheres is a beautiful electronic journey.
They did loads of live gigs before the big Orbital/Underworld live popular techno really exploded.
I missed those cause of my crusty phobia, but their records are carefully lovingly crafted.
An offshoot group Exquisite Corpse made their albums more quickly , their members couldn't handle the slow pace of PWOG creation.

Loki said...

crusty phobia... i'm afraid i used to love crusties... for a start you could always hitch a lift to london with the avrious travelling groups around yeovil at the time and they'd generally put on the best raves..deep in the woods rather than with the buzzing off me tits hordes around the m25 (never understood the whole pirate radio tells you which junction to get off... perhaps because i've never owned a car.... seems a sordid way to go to a party...)

Anonymous said...

Hey groovy, somebody remembers us! ;-) I was/am in PWoG. Those who are interested might like to check www.hidden.be , a new label run by another ex-pwogger. Thanks!

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