Album Out Now Through Echogene
Australia-based OnominO is a new sound and video collaboration between improvising drummer/composer Niko Schauble and artist/electronic musician Jon Tarry.
OnominO is a complex and emotive audio and visual experience. A suite of improvised duets combines Schauble’s sophisticated, beautiful drumming and Tarry’s “sonic drawing” – a one-of-a-kind electro-acoustic instrument that uses sensitive microphones to pick up the contact friction of a drawing pen on paper, the microscopic sounds triggering synthesiser modules and live processing techniques.
Ambient drones churn around the sound field, folding into speeding pulsations or orchestral layers as fragile tonality is shadowed by noise and dissonance. Schauble’s drumset lopes with grooves that squeeze through filters, or abstracts rhythms that smear and regroup into free-time jungle breaks of crispy snares, dubbed out toms and chattering high hats. Synth pulsations create polyrhythms which interleave like a root system, an organism growing into the environment in all directions.
In a visual dimension of the music, Tarry’s accompanying video works form a series of vignettes which travel across vast digital space-scapes and simple, touching cinematography.
Tarry and Schauble’s commitment to improvisation and intuition gives their electro-acoustic universe an organic, natural architecture. It is man and machine absorbed in each other’s operations, appearing as a model of the human integrated in a digital environment without angst or conflict; only joy, experimentation, art and sound.
©Christopher Hale
