Finding beauty, where one wouldn’t suspect it in the first place. Discovering music, where used to be only sound a moment before. Forming an orchestra out of everyday surroundings, the main thing out of the incidental, the fulfilling momentary situation out of the profane togetherness. All of this is part of the goal, meaning and sense of Oh No Noh, the project of Leipzig based guitarist, robot programmer, magnetic tape crumpler and composer Markus Rom. All of this floats and shines through "Kanzi", the second Oh No Noh album to be released on October 7th, 2022.
For Oh No Noh, this listening is also the most important part of playing, making, developing. With a love of detail and concentration, the music itself pricks its ears again and again, discovers new elements in itself, tries them out, swaps foreground and background, lets melodies become soundscapes and vice versa. "Loan" opens with a lurching cassette tape and CD skips, "Drift" elicits gentle instrumental pop from Rom's percussive robot club, "Chiralities" has guitar figures circling around each other. Sounds merge, bounce off each other, find common and surprising directions. "I like to work like this," explains Markus Rom, "that I keep turning everything inside out and end up coming out in a completely different place than I went in."
„The first concern of all music in one way or another is to shatter the indifference of hearing, the callousness of sensibility, to create that moment of solution we call poetry, our rigidity dissolved when we occur reborn—in a sense, hearing for the first time."
That's how the composer Lucia Dlugoszewski wrote it, that's how she quoted Pauline Oliveros in her standard work "Deep Listening“.
The supremely unplanned is one of the principles around which Oh No Noh has been continuously developing since the highly acclaimed debut “where one begins and the other stops”. Part of this development: The twenty-part radio series "Oh No Noh Radioh", which invited a guest in each episode to make music together in research along roughly defined concepts, ideas and inspirations. Together with technological composer Hainbach, lyricist Anne Munka, jazz keyboardist Liz Kosack or Notwist drummer Andi Haberl, encounters arose, whose patient searching and finding and whose controlled coincidences also characterize “Kanzi” - here, however, bundled, concise, notwithstanding all the love for sound and experimentation, always committed to the beauty of song.
With this desire for song-like narration, for movement, for development, "Kanzi" remains in limbo and in search. Oh No Noh’s concentration seems fleet-footed, his happy accidents well-placed, the melancholy beauty of outdated technologies, forgotten musical toys and broken sources of noise always looking ahead. Music as it happens when someone programs a whole robot band, which then becomes just a friendly part of the whole. When someone never names their numerous audio memos and is constantly distracted by moments in search of the concrete. When someone who is interrupted during the recording by a studio guest still uses the take for the album. When someone writes chord progressions to a Swedish poem, the content of which they do not understand, but the sound of which touches them deeply.
"Kanzi" was mixed by Cico Beck and mastered by Frida Claeson Johansson. It will be released on October 7th, 2022 via TELESKOP on all streaming platforms, on vinyl and of course as a cassette.