Otto von Schirach
Escalo Frio

Otto Von Schirach is one of those artists who can aspire to the title of the greatest living experimenter. The work of the Miami genius, which quickly distanced itself from the "IDM" stereotype and gradually approached the concept of absolute abstraction, is now a fundamental milestone in the history of electronic music (and beyond). Alongside the legacy of the later Autechre, Nurse With Wound, and a few others, he has managed to adopt a new approach to electronics, with extremely creative and metaphysical nuances, that highlights the inability to categorize in any pre-existing genre and the constant innovation - both formal and conceptual - as his courageous belief. Otto Von Schirach is in fact one of the most important composers of our century.

After a masterpiece of biblical dimensions, which is considered to be the legendary "8000 B.C.", Von Schirach continues his involvement with the Schematic circle by releasing "Escalo Frio" shortly thereafter, an album that, like the debut preceding it, is the result of much time spent behind his arsenal, experimenting and approaching as a faux novice that generates these two works, soon proposed to the local label launched shortly before by Romulo Del Castillo and Joshua Kay, better known as Phoenecia, who are also authors of a historic album ("Brownout") which contributed to the mythical 2001 marked by Schematic, where the two initial albums of the zany character from Miami stand out.

The second creation begins where the first ends: dissonant harmonic patterns, almost industrial mechanical cadences, expressionist canvases in an open and flamboyant style wrapped in a dense magma of apocalyptic noise that uses deviated, dislocated, and defragmented polyrhythms where every sound is meticulously calibrated, almost reminiscent of certain concrète monsters, making "Grandfatherclock" the ideal calling card for Von Schirach's art. The relentless rhythm of the chaotic digital blockbuster of "Coconut" sketches a rococo of tinkling glitch figures, a pandemonium of manic noise permutations which in their surgical geometry now more than ever stand as a manifesto of the Schematic sound. The absolute mastery in conceiving intricate percussive textures and reverberating cartilages of amorphous noise are reflected in the rhythmic loquacity of "Educating The Sound Barrier", "The Moon Is Backwards To The Trees" and "Dr. Flamenco", where rejects of amelodic hisses and (a)rhythmic fractals never so disrupted meet a rap by a mental retardant, a rap that in its unintelligibility and as happened in a less pronounced way on the debut, is to be considered more a form of spoken word as a (dis)harmonic surplus than a proper rap; "Fabric" and "Capital Letter Expansion" instead hint at what in more recent times for OVS will become a real mission, marking much of his latest releases, the rewriting of the never-too-mourned early '90s Miami-bass, in forms that preserve its irreverence, garishness, and bass worship, yet without renouncing brilliant electronic reflections from a more typical English school, carefully vivisected, assembled, and processed, intertwining and overlapping in the ocean of odd times and the typical backdrop of noise experimentation, which is nothing short of showcasing the virtuosity that the American prodigy possesses, specifically in the synthesis of sounds and structures rarely heard before.

In a sense, the music of Von Schirach echoes the experiments carried out by Bernard Parmegiani during the '70s, rewriting the typical electronic poems, but replacing the 'concrete' object (as an evolution of field recording) with the 'new' sound (as a segment never heard before and a product of the mind) which is its full characteristic: Otto Von Schirach, exploring a vast range of sonic possibilities, can at the same time be considered physical proof of how far such modern digital technologies for 'sound' work (DSP), before even synthesis, can truly go.

"Fog", "Sasquatch", and "The Chills" build a futuristic atmosphere in the succession of articulated digital scraps and mechanical IDM scales that will later be typical of the ultra-brainy sound of Richard Devine (whom he is a good friend and collaborator of); the vocal delusions and jovial melodic counterpoints between cartoon and parody in "Spooky Jar" and the insane "Yellos Staircase" take lessons from the Residents (witnessing the classic of classics, that is, the student surpassing the master), while the streetwise "Mr Egyptian Hologram" - featuring the collaboration of two genuine aces of digital avant-garde such as Matmos - sounds like a completely lobotomized DJ Shadow. It is a bizarre sketch of barely a minute, and in some ways reminiscent of Fred Frith's 'popular' collages, which has the task of foreshadowing what are the two indisputable peaks of the album (to the satire in "Commercial Id+Add" and the extraterrestrial sketches "Man Beneath The Mask" and "Crumble" the task of diluting it): "Midget Halitosis" and "Shiver". On the first, what the ear perceives is an authentic massacre of digital cracklings, glitch bacchanalia, white noise retches in which a barrage of evolving dissonant sounds outlines an industrial sonata for electronic hallucinations, a dada noise cul-de-sac flowing seemingly randomly, yet actually pervaded by strong psychoanalytic cadences, following the famous format 'succession of unexpected events' that can only explicitly reference - or rewrite, depending on the perspective - two absolute luminaries like Steven 'Nurse With Wound' Stapleton and Karlheinz Stockhausen; with the second, the same notions are repeated, but through more 'timbre'-oriented angles, via an aberrant organic mixture rich in unidentifiable alien effects, DSP torture, dark vibrations, and dronic dilations left to float, dissolve, and regenerate through sonic galaxies never discovered by humans. The galaxies of pure sound abstraction.

Galaxies into which the OVS leader, armed with all his electronic resources, guides us with command of the situation and full knowledge of the places in the monumental triptych "Lotto", "A Knock At The Door", "Crispy Hexagons", galaxies in which the surrealist nightmares and peaks of bewilderment that were - and will be - of the most abstract Autechre (read "Confield" + "Untilted") materialize clearly, tracks in which wild vortexes of cerebral electronics immersed in a muddy swamp of noise are traversed by multiform sound waves from which sonically vibrant accents emerge, now glitch, now breakcore, between the dramatic, the mantric, and the intimidating; a theater of Sound to witness with great transport and involvement in its morbid hammering, in its orgiastic rite of otherworldly effects and cosmic propulsions that allude to the purest brain dancing, the kind that even those who coined the term (artists from Rephlex, Aphex Twin, and Cylob first and foremost) have not reached with such clarity.

Otto Von Schirach manages to produce two statuesque masterpieces in his first two albums, two albums that are the testament of a Genius. Little else to say, a must-have.