Nommo Ogo – Across Time and Space

One could probably be forgiven for not being familiar with the “mid-’90s Alaskan psychedelic noise underground.” Its existence was news to me, anyway. But Nommo Ogo claims roots there, and have been plugging away for over a decade. According to their bio, they “focus on the psychic effects of sonic manipulation.” Surely such a description will immediately turn off a large subset of the music listening public, along with the prospect of 10-plus minute songs and the non-sensical hippy-dippy band name (I can’t help but be put in mind of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma). For those folks, maintaining a healthy distance from Across Time and Space is recommended. The album certainly is not going to create legions of new ambient/electronica fans. But all Moog maniacs and Eno-philes ought to take note, because the album delivers what Nommo Ogo promises (again, in their bio): “stirring up seething, sometimes bewildering vortices of mutant rhythm and vibration.” Alright then.

As such a description might imply, Across Time and Space doesn’t much concern itself with forward momentum. The songs are long indeed, but rather than building to some bombastic climax they instead meander around, morphing and undulating, and finally finishing. The only exception is the last few minutes of “Induction,” with its way-overdriven polyrhythmic noise that decays into washes of static as the song fades away. But that’s about 14 minutes into the thing, so if you’re into the forward momentum thing, you would have checked out long before.

So then if there’s not a whole lot driving these songs towards some distant point on the horizon, what keeps us listening? Well, like any ambient music worth its weight in wallpaper, Nommo Ogo does an excellent job in weaving together varying textures and timbres to create an environment. A soundscape, if I’m allowed a slightly hackneyed term. The noisy and rhythmic textures keep Across Time and Space away from overly New Age territory, and the consonant clean chordal washes temper the noisier inclinations. In the beginning of “A Call To Cats On The mMoon” there is a very pretty synthetic harp line that then gets twisted and manipulated into something not so simple and innocent before if decays into highly modulated synth chords that saunter across the stereo field. It is certainly immersive, and lends itself to dimmed-light headphone reveries, which with all their talk about “psychic effects” is surely Nommo Ogo’s intent.

Unfortunately, for all the aptitude that they have with environments and textures, I had a hard time sustaining my attentiveness throughout Across Time and Space’s 70 or so minutes. The description I gave for “mMoon” above could be slightly tweaked to describe any of the tracks on the record. It doesn’t become repetitious per se, but everything begins to sound the same. Each song is lovely to listen on its own, for its 10 to 15 minutes, but to listen to them all back to back is a chore. Each holds the kinda glitchy, skittery, Aphex Twin IDM beat at some point; each includes washes of white noise and frequency modulated synthesizers.

A couple do have some odd vocalizations, but because of the non-human tone of the rest of the record, they jar. And honestly, they sound a bit silly. The one lyric I was able to exhume from murk: “the seething vortex of time.” That’s all I got. Not a surprising snippet from a band with song titles such as “Esoterrorcle” and “Yaldaboath” (and let’s not forget the aforementioned “A Call To Cats On The mMoon”). I guess such Aquarianisms are par for the course for a band with an ambient bent and the goal of “the evocation of extra-ordinary states of consciousness” (bio again). At least with Nommo Ogo you know what you’re going to be getting from square one, for better or for worse.

Related posts:

1. Emeralds – Does It Look Like I’m Here?
2. Mathemagic- Breaststroke
3. CJ Boyd – Aerial Roots
4. Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

Tagged as: ambient, electronic

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