Check Yourself Into O/H's Cold and Industrial Sonic Asylum on 'Future Ready'

Richard Oddie and David Foster have been well known in techno, power electronics, and noise for over two decades, but it was mostly for seperate and varied projects. Since no man or electronic artist is an island, they decided to get together and form O/H. Initially standing for "Orphx and HUREN" or "Oddie and HUREN," it slowly morphed into the name of Hamilton’s psychiatric asylum, Ontario Hospital. Orphx, Richard’s original band with Christina Sealey, has been a leader in the world of noisy, bleepy techno for a long time with a sound that was rooted in industrial sensibilities but evolved towards techno while still keeping those gritty sounds and textures. David Foster aka HUREN was a part of the band Teste, whose song "The Wipe" revolutionized techno back in 1992. "The Wipe" was just re-released on Edit Select, causing much buzz in the techno world. This is not to overshadow HUREN’s own impressive work in the field of techno and power electronics, with a recent release of some new songs as well as older material on Zhark.

Individually they are both known for pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the angst-filled world of cold synth music. Together, O/H is greater than the sum of its parts, as their first release already shows the duo evolving and exploring the depth of how much angst can come out of their machines. It's exciting to think of where their sound will go to next. Future Ready, the first EP by O/H is out now on Opal Tapes and is the perfect soundtrack for those times when your brain can no longer process the incoming stimulation from the endless sea of gloom and doom we call the digital age.

Noisey: You and David have had your own success separately, when did you decide to team up to form O/H?
Richard Oddie: I think sometime in 2011 we started jamming. I don’t know that if we had the intention of doing a long term project but we just got together and started kinda fooling around. And then it really quickly came together. We were like, this is something different than what we were doing separately, so pretty early on we got excited about it.

David's energy on stage can be a bit crazy, I was just wondering what it's like to perform with someone who has that kind of energy?
It's great! I think it works well because as opposed to when he's doing his solo performances. When it comes to the two of us he has more flexibility in terms of not having to worry so much about controlling the structure and rhythms and stuff, that's more my territory and then he can focus more on vocals and textural kind of stuff.

Do you have any interesting stories about his stage performances?
Not of the top of my head, to be honest with you the more extreme performances I have seen come from his HUREN shows where I felt kinda fearful for the audience, myself or for Dave.

Yeah there's at least one time where he pulled a big knife out on stage and I took a few steps backwards fearing for my life.
Yeah I think that was the same show, it was probably the 460 show. I was like "Holy Fuck." Actually the show we did there, probably one of our first shows we ever did in Toronto, it was probably one of the best one. I mean every show is pretty much unplanned, but that one particularly so, I think we were both pretty hung over, I didn’t have high hopes for the whole thing to be honest. I think we played the night before with Magic Shadows this like punk/garage type thing I was doing and that was a bit of a disaster and then we went to that show and we were like 'well we will see what happens here'. It turned out to be really, really good. I think he had a baseball bat on stage for that one.

Can you walk me through a bit of the process that goes into making an O/H song?
It's literally like we plug in and do it. SO I’ll have stuff prepared like usual all of the material comes from preparing for a show, so I'll put together some beats and some synth stuff that I can improvise with for the show. And then when it comes to recording we will improvise using some of that material from the shows. So at this point there is like a big back log of stuff that can be used for a show or for recording. I kinda like that its interchangeable there is not much distinction between doing a show and like recording a track, except with the recording obviously we can take our time with it. We don’t really usually have a plan, we just sort of start going and then you know Dave might have some lyrics prepared but we just kinda wing it and then record a bunch of stuff and edit it.

You describe your genre as "Ritualized Catharsis", what do you mean by that?
I guess one aspect is this kind of violent energy, that's in the music and in the performance and that we are both kind of inclined towards that kind of sound and that kind of energy. So cathartic in the sense it’s kind of running on that kind of energy and there is also the strong aspect of the fact it's improvised so that there is this sense of risk and this sense of working in the moment which you could describe as kind of ritualized, kind of improvising off that energy.

What's next for O/H, as well as Orphx and Huren?
We are both pretty excited because at the moment Dave is branching out with a whole bunch of different things so like he's revised his techno stuff, he's doing his power electronics stuff, he's doing O/H, he's revived Teste so there all this stuff happening with him. And Orphx is rolling along and I have that other thing with Ancient Methods and another project that is more like ambient kinda black metal-ish stuff.

So it’s a cool moment ‘cause there is all this stuff that we are both doing and then like working on the project together so there’s a lot of good creative energy. In terms of what we are doing, we have like enough for another 12"so we are just figuring out where to do that, if it will be with the same label or elsewhere, we don't know.

Aaron Cunningham is a writer living in Toronto - @sinsmusik