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MH-222 Octavius - Audio Noir  Octavius has strived to perfect his stunning amalgam of hip-hop, electronic and avant-rock music in the San Francisco underground over the past four years. This dedication has culminated in his Mush full-length release Audio Noir. Serving as a slight departure from the beats and noise frenzy that ignited a buzz around his 2001 work with 4AM, the new release looks to establish Octavius as a purveyor of even more elaborate territories of sound. Experimental freak-outs collide with classic song structures, tension and attitude give way to raw vulnerability, and Octavius' vocal and production techniques are employed to unnerving effect. Audio Noir adds previously missing darkness and edge to the Mush catalog in a way that overwhelms, thrills, and astonishes in equal measure. |
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| Reviews Summary |
| This is an important record - LA Weekly / This record is literally unforgettable. - Industrial Nation / Delicious left-field despondency - Outburn / Great invention and blasted beauty throughout - The Wire / a tense, aggressive and surprisingly beautiful album that dares you to define it as hip-hop. - Signal to Noise / A new flavor of hop that's dangerous and mesmerizing. - San Francisco Examiner |
| Reviews |
| Although Octavius is a producer with roots in hip-hop, his music touches down on a more ambient terrain, where the beats often play second fiddle to dark, sci-fi cinema wrought of stray samples, vocals, and live instrumentation. At first, Audio Noir strikes you as heavily experimental and bleak, but remarkably, the album's play goes down the gullet without much effort at all. Credit Octavius for delivering such delicious left-field despondency. A track like "Monochrome" kicks things off with its apocalyptic score, flavored by thick, echo chambered lyrics growling over morbid settings of strings and backward guitar loops. The track, a tense, spine-tingling trek for the psyche, climaxes into a swirling cacophony full of rock dynamics, guitar chords, and drums crashing tsunami-like against their placid cliffs. "Momentum/Parisian War Song" and the rhythmic "Speed Limit" exploit spoken-words, throwing them into an unforgiving cloud of stomach churning beatscapes. "Sudden and Increasingly Strange Behavior" continues with rays of hope struggling to find their way out of a suffocating fog, invoking bittersweet desperation. By the album's end, you feel strangely sad and exhausted, but also satisfied at finding such entertainment value within its tortured constructs. - Outburn |
2XLP/Out Of Print