Nice drawing. What? That's really him? No, stop it ...
Hannis Brown – “Oh Ah Ee” MP3/download
“Oh Ah Ee” somehow sounds like a train roaring down the tracks and through the night, its beat hitting like the sound of freight cars clanging together. The fluid bass playing and uncomfortably high-pitched vocals eventually take over, the choo-choo feeling engulfed by a sinister, effects-driven rise in intensity.
Just got this track today; I don’t normally post stuff so fast but this is different from just about everything I’ve heard in the last year or two — Hannis Brown, hats off to you. I hear dead people; also, if I had to throw some comparisons out there, I’d go with:
- Babe, Terror, because they use the human voice as an instrument in a similar fashion.
- Book Of Shadows, mostly because the continual bass diddling is a lot like a recent BoS song, “Trailer Space,” that I have been lucky enough to hear …
- John Fahey gets a nod because he also heavily favored the arpeggio.
- Grizzly Bear/Department Of Eagles come to mind by dint of the vocals.
- The Books, because … geez, this is a reach but I love The Books so I’ll leave them in here.
- Au, because Au are weird too. That’s … that’s all I got.
I guess I’m relatively unaffiliated with a lot of the influences on display here, too. I’m sure there are some free-jazz/musique concrète/avant guard/otherwise-experimental touchstones I’m missing here, and that’s OK because I’ve never purported to be one of those guys with a dozen Terry Riley recordings on his hard drive and a Philip Glass poster in his room.
I do love me some Edgar Varese, however.
As you can see, I’m fairly lost for words here. Check out the tune yrself and transport to another land/planet/galaxy.
