Otso - Dendermonde [Elli Records 003]

Put on the circuit on November 24th, 2k16 via Elli Records is "Dendermonde", the latest musical effort by globetrotting artist and composer Otso Lähdeoja. Sticking to his first name Otso for his outings, which translates as 'bear' and leads to him wearing a bear mask on the cover of this EP, the Finnish artist presents a menu of four tracks on this one, starting with "QC Underground" - a kinda knaggy take on Indietronica fusing electronics, partly even played backwards, and various layers of unevenly looped guitar which do not exactly fall into place here. Following up is "Banshee", a variation of dubbed out, glitched and distorted Electronica accompanied by various layers of hissing  digital noises, female non-vocalisms and even a tripping, psychedelic 70s guitar whilst "Overwinning" represents a more intimate, inward-looking approach combining crackly surface noise, multilayered guitar improvisations with an homage to dubbed out TripHop and more psychedelia. Finally "Mue End" introduces a droning vision of harmonica-based Ambient which gets a little annoying after a few minutes although paying homage to Pole's unique use of bass tones on his first three albums and therefore concludes a mixed bag of an EP which comes up with an interesting although pretty much wearisome artistic vision which, in its entirety, does not necessarily match what we're looking for in terms of conceptual electronic music.

EP artwork on Instagram!