O(f)verandas: O(f)verandas
Sparkwood Records / Northwood & 4

By some strange coincidence, I happened to be re-reading “The Dunwich Horror” the other night while O(f)verandas's self-titled debut album played in the background. Not that there's anything specifically Lovecraftian about Bernard Iannone's long-player for the Norwegian Sparkwood Records imprint, though it certainly shares a rather macabre quality with the writer's nightmarish universe. A visual artist as well as musician, Iannone produced the fortty-five-minute album's six tracks using an Epiphone Les Paul along with an array of effects pedals and samples lifted from the ‘80s radio program Vanishing Point and the films Waking Life and 21 Grams. The track titles suggest the Columbus-based sound sculptor's got an unhealthy obsession with brackets, but it's his hallucinatory soundscapes that are our primary concern.

They're undoubtedly an evocative bunch. As to what they represent or mean, that isn't entirely clear (to me at least), though any absence of clarity doesn't make them any less engaging on pure listening grounds. During a representative soundscape such as “(Nightwave Channeler),” Iannone uses guitar to generate ghostly washes that quietly resonate like electric flickerings during rainsoaked evenings; disembodied voices surface unexpectedly, imparting messages with desperate determination to some intended audience, and alien noises of indeterminate origin also emerge from the murk. Things are generally kept at an even keel for much of it, but you'd be wise to steel yourself for a caustic disruption that erupts midway through “(Autumnal Acid) II.” O(f)verandas would appear tobe the kind of project where it's perfectly reasonable for a phantom trace of rave techno to appear as part of the collage-styled sound design, as happens during the fourth track “(Metanoia),” or for the material to plunge into the ambient-industrial deep end, as it does during the near-psychotic set-closer “(A Secret Place).” Not everything is permitted necessarily, but there's definitely an open-ended sensibility in play.

That the recording was jointly mastered by Bernard and Mike Iannone offers some hint of what the pre-listener might expect from O(f)verandas, given that Michael (Bernard's brother?) operates under the the [MIIIIM] moniker and has issued excellent Sparkwood sets of his own, namely the full-length [MIIIIM] and EP Mansfield Reformatory, both of them 2015 releases. Based on the evidence at hand, O(f)verandas and [MIIIIM] would appear to be a full-length collaboration waiting to happen.

March 2018