Ovoo likes to shroud itself in mystery, as if to throw people off the scent: this duo, which emerged in the mountains of south-eastern France between 2023 and 2024, says it loves retrofuturism with ancient aesthetics, space-time labyrinths, timeless cosmic phenomena, ancient gods, epic films and science fiction… in short, a landscape where notions of scale are shattered and where humanity seems utterly tiny. And yet, it is precisely the human factor that lies at the heart of their (almost) entirely instrumental debut album, Obsidian, an adventurous post-noise-rock-industrial exploration.
Let’s keep it brief on the names: Ovoo has nothing to do with the mad Italian alchemists of OvO (although the fact that both released something on the same day doesn’t exactly help to clear things up!). What’s more, the tracks on the album are numbered from I to VII, the Roman numerals evoking that taste for antiquity… Brass instruments lurk beneath layers of spacey synths; the rhythms are by turns frenzied and overwhelming; the guitars eventually roar out a haunting, exotic melody with a Mediterranean feel – a fragile echo of late-90s Nine Inch Nails. In the distance, deep choral voices. The sound is massive, the picture evocative: Ovoo combines the immensity and coldness of the cosmos with the mysteries of ancient temples, the epic battles of the past with an introspective solitude in silence and emptiness. This constant tension is reflected in the music, which swells, creeps, bursts forth, catches its breath, surprises and sweeps you away. Here, the usual post-rock contrasts between light and shadow are complemented by the juxtaposition of temporalities, textures, soundscapes, vibrant life and an icy grandeur that exists beyond our perception.
We told you that the human element lies at the heart of music: Jean-Philippe, aka Astrocyte JFI, uses what he calls the ‘instrumentarium’ – a collection of unusual instruments he has created himself. The result is as bewildering as it is organic, accompanied by the drums of Alexandre, aka Sid Negativv, who, far from conforming to the rigidity of industrial rhythms, breaks free to live his own life and conjure up an extra dose of chaos. As a result, Ovoo’s music is always visceral and unpredictable, never boring like some of those slightly pretentious and cerebral post-whatever avant-garde bits can be. Ovoo hits hard, hard enough for the tremors to reach your guts, whilst a few sparingly placed bursts of dissonance regularly catch your attention. It’s visceral, expansive and cast in the shadow of the perpetual futuristic menace of the synths.
The listener finds themselves in the role of a somewhat lost traveller, immersed in a shifting landscape where time stands still. The musicians, for their part, are two slightly mad explorers who whisk us away from obscure reveries to phantasmagorical worlds – as if Doctor Who would have listened to Aluk Todolo whilst wandering – which is evident in the sometimes mystical tones, when Obsidian becomes an incantatory ritual where a trance-like state is never far away. Exploring the cosmos and travelling through time are not without risk: you encounter forgotten horrors and unspeakable dangers; you can get lost; your very conception of reality can crumble… but you eventually finds oneself in awe of these strange, marvellous lands. The same can be said of Ovoo’s musical explorations. We can picture them, in their studio-laboratory, seeking to unravel the mysteries of sound with their strange contraptions, yet in doing so, unearthing other, ever more enigmatic mysteries.
