OHR
SPOTIFY / TWITTER / BANDCAMP / INSTAGRAM /
LOCATION: Seattle, WA
GENRE: electronic, rock, ambient, drone, psychedelic, trance
INFLUENCES: Ashra, Can, Happy Mondays, Basic Channel, Jane’s Addiction
Publicist: CHRIS ESTEY / 206.728.0457 / ESTEY@XOPUBLICITY.COM
Label: Headstate Records
By Steven Krakow (Chicago Reader, Drag City, Galactic Zoo Dossier etc.)
From the opening celestial synth streams on the debut album by Ohr, followed by stacks of voices intoning from the void, one knows this is going to be a journey. On the double LP opus, "Walk in the Light," songs assemble and deconstruct out of existence, with backwards textures flowing in and out of the soulful, sun-gazing tunes. Recurring motifs appear and disappear throughout like dappled light through the forest canopy. There's clearly a directorial vision at work here, and behind the lense is Craig Klein, who wrote, produced and provided vocals and nearly all of the instruments on the 17 track album.
Klein was formerly the main songwriter for Chicago art-rockers The Race. The Race received extensive national press including reviews in Pitchfork, Pop Matters, The AV Club and Magnet and shared the stage with acts such as The National, The Killers, Arcade Fire, The White Stripes and many more. The Race both downsized and expanded, essentially becoming a Klein solo vehicle, while sonically blossoming into new electronic terrain. The Race's final album, Exiles released on Secretly Canadian imprint St. Ives, further embraced electronics and world building--as did Klein's subsequent techno project, Down There.
Klein’s move to Seattle in 2014 was initially plagued with personal hardships, leading to struggles with depression and anxiety, so he started writing the music for what would become the Ohr project, as a therapeutic way to make something positive and life-affirming. Klein describes the evolution of the record:
"I was creating these beds of sound with my voice, tremolo guitars, and layers of synths and organs, trying countless combinations until I hit on the palette of the album. I got really wrapped up in sonics and flow, and how certain chords and combinations of layered sounds made me feel and how one song connected to the next. The record has a lot of different feels and moods but also elements that recur in one way or another throughout. My goal was to make something very direct, layered, enveloping, and hopefully uplifting.”
Klein definitely succeeded in expressing this range of emotion and found a perfect name for this musical vehicle, Ohr, which is a word for "light" in Hebrew and "ear" in German, and is a nod to the label of the same name. Ambient tones and elongated dream-like passages, primordial gospel strains and dance music are served up in a modern miasma in the way Tame Impala, The Flaming Lips, Panda Bear or Sonic Boom seamlessly blend the psychedelic past, present, and even future.
While all manner of auditory details ripple by, the narcotized hooks permeate creating the perfect mix of kaleidoscopic sound and hallucinatory songwriting. In a perfect world this mammoth double LP would be synched up to your favorite head film, but maybe rather than the Wizard of Oz, a Werner Herzog film featuring far-off vistas...