You never set foot into Jeremy Moore’s sonic world without bracing yourself for the unexpected. In fact, the unexpected is the one thing you can expect; apart from that, you need to free your mind, brace for impact, and just take what’s coming.
AD Ozium, one of his many sonic vehicles, sees him plowing musical forrows around the fringes of freak folk, psychedelia, no wave, avant-garde drone, and perhaps the most experimental instrumental music you may have ever heard. There are glimpses of conventions, occasional adherence to the rules, and slight flashes of familiarity, but by and large, the music found here relates to music traditions in the same way that Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is a portrait of a clock.
Opener “Lifespring” feels exactly like those melting time pieces, a blend of dark drone and languid, discordant guitars, similarly losing form and shape as the track bubbles away.
If “Whore of Sound” echoes the feeling of searing anglegrinder guitars stumbling across melody as it rips itself apart from the inside and “Faith is a Hole” is the sound of new chord progressions being forged in the intense heat and pressure of metamorphic lava chambers, “A Practical Act of Prowess” feels like someone has mic-ed up a space craft as it blisters it’s way through the atmosphere on reentry, whilst alien jams are picked up via the communication system.
If my descriptions of this album seem to belittle or satirize the music, nothing could be further from the truth. In my defense, when faced with music this challenging, this unique, this out there, you need to invent a whole different language to talk about it. And while I may or may not have done so successfully, hopefully I have at least conveyed that the most adventurous music can’t be explained with any of the words or ideas you would use to discuss a three-minute pop song.
Jeremy Moore, across his numerous projects, is not only pushing the boundaries of what music can be but also making us redefine how we write about it.
