Oneida
Absolute II

Four compositions like a post-nuclear chiasm. It’s almost as if all the symbolism and coded references to the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are revealed in one go. We’ve reached the point where either you sign in blood to stay in the game, because it’s becoming heavy to accept, or you drop it and continue living while trying to reject the idea of this possible future.

To close the trilogy, Oneida offers us the evolved dimension of their sound, along a line of futurism that ends in a hyperbaric chamber destined to fry. Here we are far from the psychedelic, electronic, spacey dub rock, disturbed and krautrock (and many other things) of the previous chapter, and indeed very far from the opening. You can’t even say we’re at the antipodes: this is music from another place. Or from our place, the one shared by six billion of us, at the moment when it will be burning with fires not sparked and fueled by natural causes. Likely generated by the deflagration of time-bomb industries, triggered by deranged atoms.

This album is overwhelmed by fuzz characterized by being as acidic and electric as possible, and very sharp. Any instrument, voice, or effect that tries to step into the four tracks becomes infected by this sick, turbulent, droning, and oxyhydric air electricity. That moved by a chemical fire, whose flames are perpetually straight and whitest, never free to writhe and warm like those of a natural fire. With the Oneida of these times, only cold and aseptic environments (possibly the ones in your head) are visited, despite everything burning. If you’re familiar with those war films where someone dying in the bloodiest shootout of humanity sees everything in slow motion, and a placid music contrasts with the frenzy around and precedes the rigor mortis, well, you’re close.

If it’s about evolution, it’s easy to understand, in any case, why this album lands on shores that I feel I’ve already heard extensively elsewhere. The difference is made by the stamp with which this stuff gets sent to your head, and on the stamp, there’s the word Oneida. It sounds like them, and that's why it sounds forward. It’s a sound that you have to try to reach. It doesn't make you comfortable and doesn’t sing you your favorite lullaby. If you want it, you need to strive to keep up with it. Once again? Yes. The marathoners who managed to come out of the Rated 0 slalom must do it all over again and march, sweat, get paranoid to then reach that turning point in the mind. When you understand everything and calm down, you’re serene, while knowing that your internal value scale is all scrambled. But, there it is, you’ve reached a new balance. The problem is precisely this shifting balance, perspective, and awareness with each release.

Or, more simply, Absolute II is the umpteenth harsh scratch that erases all possible ontology on their music. It’s useless to reason about it. Oneida was born to raise the bar, to baffle, to provide no points of reference, to bring the concept of listening in absolute value to its extreme consequences. Today it seems they want to change the playing field, challenging listeners and taking them into a non-place a-musical space and leaving them locked in there, so they can watch them bewildered and frozen with fear, from behind a one-way mirror. There, I see them enjoy, sadistically, our reactions induced by this ruthless, uncompromising, and mephistophelean minimalism. Melody n.0, that is, itself after having undergone an intervention in radiology with rays out of human control.

This then made me reflect on a couple of things.

1) I have always been liked by women. Even those who are emotionally wooden and believe in the waxed muscle. A hairy brain makes an impression just as much, some have understood this. I am surrounded by looks from women of different ages, the older ones being mothers with children around 10 - 12 years old, girls, peers, even some teenagers. Sometimes I have also made selections, many other times I have dealt with the bottleneck at the end of an absurdly dry night. I continue to be loved and sought after by women. Yet their men detest me. Some would like to slam my head against the wall with their own fists and make my brain splash out through my free ear. Some want to see me suffer. Who knows what they boast about regarding me, in the privacy of their garden violated by the presence of my thought in their women’s heads. They will say they’ll kill me, that a fool like me hasn’t often been seen. They will ask not to pay me attention, to ignore me. I meet many women before I meet their men. There is immediate harmony and much enthusiasm. Then it happens that I meet him. Within a month, they no longer talk to me. I feel he perceives the threat. I feel she still thinks about me the same way, even if she can’t tell me. There’s one in mind among them, in whose garden I will step the day after tomorrow night when I will happen to see her, and she will be in company, but not his.

2) That unreasonable rationalist cousin of mine has preferential access to being directly told to go screw himself. I talk about Kasparov, and the next day he talks about him, I talk about "Non ti pago" and the next day he knows a bit more about it. I speak and he knows. Fortunately, it’s clear he’s a psychorigid type. I think he hates his deep academic knowledge and having understood all the philosophy he has studied. The fact is, he’s trapped. Theoretically, he knows everything but lacks daily life experience and would like to steal it from me. He flaunts my popular knowledge, aplenty. Because he knows that only I and a couple of others could understand him when he speaks his way. He tries to make himself palatable to the public by talking about my life, my discoveries, as if they were his own. I am pleased to know that a Cartesian like him deeply envies my life, that a tabula-raster like him finds my life worthy of being recounted. I thank myself for having developed my personal philosophy of life and never having bought Abbagnano’s books.

Long live Oneida and those who get into them.