Cassette
Final Image, the imprint co-operated by O Yuki Conjugate in the 80s, reactivates for this first time collaboration between OYC's Andrew Hulme and likeminded sound explorer, Tom Fazzini. Familiarity with the work of either, whether together or solo and broadly routed in the realm of post-/ethno-industrial experimentalism, will serve you well for the noise they make together across these six immaculately produced tracks. There's elements of OYC's portentous dread in the opening and closing tracks - the 'dirty ambient' epitet that's followed them around for 40 or so years seems appropriate enough here - while elsewhere we get a discernible sense of the cinematic, unsurprising really, given Hulme's other life in film and the name of the label. As with near-all of the 'post-reformation' OYC output, the attention to texture, tone and pacing is borderline expert, the sense of a sensibility being continually sharpened and honed. It's not so much that Hulme and Fazzini sound inspired here as they do confidently themselves. Veterans perhaps, vital most certainly. Better still, allegedly the first in a series of collaborations between the pair....
