"did I hear you calling / in the middle of the night time / woke up to the something of the city working overtime / searching for the motion at the bottom of the night time / midnight gossip caught up in the echo of the 9 to 5..."
The tense burning melancholic meditation of “Vantorinex” from Italian-born, Brooklyn-based composer Molto Ohm, from his sophomore full length "Reality Pills" and featuring guest vocalist Jachary, gets in your head and heart and makes you feel things. Embued with hypnotic swells, surprising half step progressions providing an emotional dissonance and what feels like city field recordings results in a truly filmic framework for Jachary's beautiful vocal performance. Ohm has a way with universe building that more often than not, at least here, keeps you on an emotional edge of sorts that might just have you drifting off into memories of your own loneliness or static detachments making you feel off course from what your path should be.
Ohm constructs atmospheres that feel potently dreamlike but, quite possibly, on the edge of a nightmare or at least a very restless sleep. I like the simple musical notions here that in their totality run deep, become a complex equation maybe having to do with how too much input ends up making us feel out of place. Press notes state this about the album (excerpted) "a sonic pharmacology for the overs(t)imulated—a quasi-ambient pop album that explores the psychic toll of life lived through screens." I can imagine the psychic dinge of social media coupled with the density of city life and those all too familiar police sirens (at least during all my time in Manhattan) creating an elevated, rarified flashbulb high and inevitable crash.
LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):
[Nodding to philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, the album explores how digital representations, once reflections of the real, have become more vivid, more compelling, and ultimately more “real” than reality itself. Reality Pills offers a prescription that is both critique and salve: immersive, reflective, and subtly disorienting.
Each of the album's nine tracks is named after a fictional medicine: Vantorinex, Clymperid, Zorvitol, Lunovarine, etc. These invented substances act as affective remedies, mimicking the promises of real-world pharmaceuticals and algorithmically tailored experiences. Some tracks feel warm and hopeful, offering ambient calm and a glimmer of sonic hope, while others introduce dissonance and dark emotional undercurrents.]
[In order to capture this on Reality Pills, Molto Ohm set out to refine the sound-collage approach of his live performances, defined by layering his recent work with long-collected synth ideas, corporate messaging, environmental sounds, choir fragments, and pop songs, into a deliberate studio form.
The album was built from a core palette of hardware synths, guitar run through pedal effects, and a wide spectrum of voices—a choir comprised of Molto Ohm’s layered vocals, voiceovers, artificial voices, archival recordings, and guest contributions from New York producer and multi-instrumentalist Jachary (L'Rain, Tasha), New York psych-pop project Tanners, New York guitarist Aditya Chatterjee, and bi-coastal artist and touring pianist Puck (King Princess, SZA).]
Ohm's work feels transfixing just from this first release and I have a feeling that this or other parts of the album will find it's way onto the soundscape of some film in the future because the dreamscape aspect, an amalgam of dreamcore, 70's broad pop psychedelia, experimental, post rock and more stirs up feelings, pain, wants, desires that are universal.
-Robb Donker Curtius
The Chicken Wheel will take you to the AP Go Fund Me- and any amount is so appreciated!
https://www.instagram.com/molto_ohm/
https://www.moltoohm.com/
The Chicken Wheel will take you to the AP Go Fund Me- and any amount is so appreciated!
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://www.instagram.com/molto_ohm/
https://www.moltoohm.com/
https://moltoohm.bandcamp.com/
Matteo Liberatore’s new project Molto Ohm is a sonic and visual exploration of the interplay between digital life and social decay on an emotional level. In today's alluring digital world, we are merely users, to whom health, beauty, love, and connection are promised. But at what cost? In the end, we find ourselves alone, void of purpose yet still mindlessly scrolling, pulling furtively on a pane of glass, unable to break through.
Utilizing a mixed palette of sporadic dance beats, seductive voices, synthetic melodies and environmental sound, the music deftly distills these experiences into arresting aural scenes. Liberatore’s prior prolific work in the realms of improvised and creative music is combined with his experience working as a freelance sound recordist in the advertising industry, as well as memories of dancing in nightclubs as a teenager in Italy, to assemble a work that is at once profoundly alienating and deeply intimate.
For the live experience, Molto Ohm plays next to a vertical screen projection that is complementing (or not…) the ideas expressed in the music, creating an immersive world of screen recordings, 360 footage, iPhone footage, and stock footage, in which the audience can get lost, amused, bewildered.
A third absurdist club night, a third art experience, a third movie, you won’t be disappointed.
Molto Ohm started performing live in 2023 and since then worked on commissions for Composers Now and Metropolis Ensemble, as well as collaborations with artists such as Taja Cheek of L’Rain, Ka Baird, Lester St Louis of HxH, Alyse Lamb of Parlor Walls, more eaze, Brian Wenner.
Matteo Liberatore’s new project Molto Ohm is a sonic and visual exploration of the interplay between digital life and social decay on an emotional level. In today's alluring digital world, we are merely users, to whom health, beauty, love, and connection are promised. But at what cost? In the end, we find ourselves alone, void of purpose yet still mindlessly scrolling, pulling furtively on a pane of glass, unable to break through.
Utilizing a mixed palette of sporadic dance beats, seductive voices, synthetic melodies and environmental sound, the music deftly distills these experiences into arresting aural scenes. Liberatore’s prior prolific work in the realms of improvised and creative music is combined with his experience working as a freelance sound recordist in the advertising industry, as well as memories of dancing in nightclubs as a teenager in Italy, to assemble a work that is at once profoundly alienating and deeply intimate.
For the live experience, Molto Ohm plays next to a vertical screen projection that is complementing (or not…) the ideas expressed in the music, creating an immersive world of screen recordings, 360 footage, iPhone footage, and stock footage, in which the audience can get lost, amused, bewildered.
A third absurdist club night, a third art experience, a third movie, you won’t be disappointed.
Molto Ohm started performing live in 2023 and since then worked on commissions for Composers Now and Metropolis Ensemble, as well as collaborations with artists such as Taja Cheek of L’Rain, Ka Baird, Lester St Louis of HxH, Alyse Lamb of Parlor Walls, more eaze, Brian Wenner.
Molto Ohm, Italian born / New York based, multi-media, indie electronic, post rock, dreamcore, artist, producer, collaborator, new 2nd album "Reality Pills", sonic glimpse, single “Vantorinex” ft. Jachary, cinematic,
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