Odd Nosdam: Burner
ODD NOSDAM
BURNER
ANTICON
If you’ve struggled with the self-consciously wacky and gratingly nasal delivery of MCs why? and Doseone, Odd Nosdam’s partners in cLOUDDEAD, you’ll warmly greet their absence on “Burner”. Nosdam is free here to bring his pain-stakingly scuffed soundscapes to the fore. Like his hero Lee Perry, Nosdam is obsessed with the liminal qualities of sonic distortion in recording. Every envelope of this collection is flecked with static and subsumed in hiss. Antique vinyl samples crackle, snatches of radio hum with interference, instruments dwell in the red and foley is occluded by background noise. Music is thus encroached upon by sound, suggesting ego itself melting into the ether.
The tone of this post-Hip-Hop sonic collage is perhaps more sombre than Odd Nosdam’s previous LP “No Wig for Ohio”, which admitted some rinky-dink touches often in the form of sideways digs at mainstream America, a mainstream which in the intervening four years may appear less cheerfully surreal. One of the voices on “Small Mr Man Pants” remark: “A bird in the hand is very nice to have,” and indeed this grudging settling for less seems to ring true to the state of underground America. It’s tempting to view the record as some kind of soundtrack to destitution and homelessness. The “Burner” of the title could easily be a vagrant’s makeshift fire, the exhaust trails of feedback equivalent to the polluting smoke of “unsuitable fuel” plastic bottles, soiled paper and methylated spirits. The hobo economics incarnate in Nosdam’s choice of raw materials: “the most worthlessly obscure records I can find in the basements of Walnut, Iowa’s many antique shops,” ostensibly free-to-procure street recordings and the contributions by “friends” (including vocals Mike Patton and Jessica Bailiff) bear this out.
Unfortunately enthusiasm for the record is tempered by its faults. Only “Upsetter” and “Untitled One” come close to bearing a satisfying hook. If you’re destined to sit in front of a smoking hearth, you may want it to bear a little more heat. Too often tracks seem to pursue a convoluted logic, before ending up lost in rhythmic cul-de-sacs, though admittedly it may be that more focus would be antithetical to Nosdam’s aesthetic.