If you like the idea of the three-minute pop song, of music that doesn’t require much engagement, a tune which can jig and jog along in the background, requiring neither thought nor reflection, AD Ozium perhaps isn’t for you. I know that might sound presumptuous, elitist even, but I doubt you would find music made by Jeremy Moore rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ed Sheeran in many people’s record collections, which is, in many ways, a real shame.
Body Without Organs might seem like a daunting presence upon approach, especially if this is the first time you have come across music like AD Ozium. A useful way to think about it, perhaps, is that if drifty, ambient, understated music is perfect for meditating freely on many of life’s deeper issues, music like this is the flip side of the same coin, making you hyperfocused and finding yourself violently drawn towards an until now hidden stream of thought.
‘Accelerationism’ blends brooding, early gothic menace with squalling space noise; it is both something other and jarringly industrial, introducing sonic themes that thread through the album and perhaps never so disquietingly as on ‘Terrorgramaphone.’
‘Space of Flow’ is fractured and disorienting, wandering between glitch and grace, dark-folk swirls and ritualistic vocals, its broken nature drawing attention to the embedded messages of ongoing, generational dehumanization that societies are, perhaps unknowingly, built on.
And if ‘Capitulation’ is a marriage of white noise and sonic decay, it is only because it echoes the dichotomy of resistance and subservience, revolution and complacency at the core of the modern social structure.
This is not an album that you get or don’t get; it is an album that asks, forces even, you to think differently about the world. There are no distracting melodies, no singalongs, and no easy lyrics to grab you by the hand and lead you to the artist’s preferred conclusions. This music merely opens a door; what you find within, and how you respond to it, is a personal matter. As a piece of thought-inducing sonic art, it is abstract and artful, poignant and powerful, fractured and fascinating, unfathomable and liberating.
Nothing good comes without hard work, and that’s true of music too, for both creator and listener. The rewards are there, but you have to dig deep.
