Tombed Visions Presents: OMA & ZIM ZUM

OMA
OMA is the brain child of Don McLean, founder of Action Beat. Employing an array on modular synthesisers and surgically constructed rhythms, McLean has managed to distil the energy and agression of his main project into hulking, atmosphere swallowing avant-garde techno. For this show, Don will be joined by bandmate Harry ‘The Engineer’ Taylor, Bianca Bibiloni, poet Lauren Bolger and younger brother David McLean on tenor saxophone, having recently played with latter two musicians across several dates last October in New York.

Here’s the skinny on OMA’s first album, which was issued by Tombed Visions last year:
A collaborative album featuring members of Action Beat, Bad Body and helmed by the incomparable G.W. Sok, OMA is the second recording to be issued by Tombed Visions that is the product of experimentations generated at the legendary WORM Studios in Rotterdam. Moving from strafing, disquieting techno, impassioned spoken word and ghostly ambience, it is the brevity of OMA’s run time that marks its success as hallucinatory audial trip. ‘Aberfan’ deals with the notorious Welsh landslide disaster of 1966, G.W Sok delivery intoned with the weight of survivors guilt and a world weariness earned from the injustice of preventable catastrophe. The bell chimes and cathedral organs that end the track wooze with the kind of saccharine, redemptive awfulness that characterise the empty sentiments of politicians and mining authorities at the time of the tragedy. Sok leads the charge again on album ender ‘Hospital’, half shouting “Can you hear the dogs crying from hunger?” as bass drums and floor toms hit the mid-section like a drunken brawler fighting through a mist of noxious gas. It has the atmospheric dread of a prison beating. Bianca Biblioni’s golden vocals on ‘Black Mirror’ act as an antidote to these two oppressive tracks, melding with a haze of sun drenched synths that hint at a distant euphoria. ‘Juno’ opens the album with throaty and roiling synths, the beat these melodies lie a top carrying an infectious rhythm that wouldn’t sound out of place on John Carpenter’s seminal Assault on Precinct 13 OST, albeit with a Giallo score sheen. The material the group generated over the long weekend of their residency would have been vast, but again, OMA’s surgical scalping and forming of the music into a tightly woven 25 minutes full of differing pace, mood and atmosphere means they’ve managed to touch on more pools of sound than many in the experimental electronic scene take a whole oeuvre to explore.
https://tombedvisionsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/oma

ZIM ZUM
Zim Zum is the solo project of Amy Horgan who is part of the Islington Mill art collective in Salford and a founding member of the psychedelic ritual collective WATER. An uneasily sublime blending of industrial damaged techno and seraphic ambience, utilising strictly analogue equipment and voice, Amy’s debut record was recently issued on the critically acclaimed ZamZam records
https://zamzamrec.bandcamp.com/album/zim-zum

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