Happy birthday, Fabio Orsi! You were born a few weeks ago (April 6th) but you’re ONE OF US — those born during the month of April — and thus are worthy of being celebrated. Especially your album Osci, which I picked up out of the used bin at Aquarius Records in San Francisco back in July of 2009. I remember being in town with my then-girlfriend en route to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and I couldn’t pass up a trip to AQ. As it was July, I was totally freaked out about keeping the records I purchased from melting while we stuffed our faces at the nearby Taqueria Cancun. All my sweet vinyl survived the trip, including this limited edition (just 320 copies pressed!) master class is ambient/abstract music. Oh, and it only set me back $4.50 — I fucking love Aquarius.
Osci is a deep hole into the ground of the loved/hated traditional music. It is a snatch with the past, watching it from unusual perspective, with deforming lens under coloured lights. Osci never meets “Art”, it is something like a hack. As the sickle relates about the man, but it’s completely unconcerned with their destiny. He speaks the speech of crickets and ants. Time no exist. Telephone are not used to ring and the bees are assembling a “flying saucers” with the elements of an old washing machine. Telephone doesn’t know how to ring and voices are gliding in to the dark from mouths full of soil and cheap beer, talking about obscene love proposals. Under the Sun we reverse a big stone and the name of a girl crawls out, into the grass. Someone picks up it from the ground, and put it on the neck as an amulet. Violin’s strings clasp the heart in an August night. Flames itching the flesh with pain. Finally our body shows infinite chances. Inside and outside. Every single pore is a hole. Inside is outside. A blink. We would like to shake the skin from bodies, jumping in the fire. A blink. Then we leave by car, disappearing on dusty roads. Sentenced to a slow craziness. All the rumours pushing under the scab. Where the streets are swelling as the veins and the buildings are collapsing, we plant a microphone, cold as a needle.
Over at Fabio’s official Bandcamp page, Osci is broken down into 8 distinct tracks. On the LP, there are just two sides. Supposedly it was packaged with three postcards, but my copy only contains one. Maybe the original owner really wanted to send some letters to friends but was out of stationary. Either that or the other review I read of Osci was wrong.
This is the only album of Fabio’s that own, and I’m not sure many of his releases have been issued on vinyl. Although Osci was originally released in 2006, I didn’t even know anything of its creator until I was listening to WFMU and heard a track from his collaboration with Valerio Cosi, which was called Thoughts Float In The Air. That’s literally all it took for me to being exploring the respective artists’ catalogs, and you can imagine my shock/joy/amazement when I stumbled across that cheap-as-fuck copy of Osci sitting in the used bin that afternoon up north. And then I had some incredible garlic-y food at the festival. And then I drove my stinking records back to Los Angeles. And then I got dumped. And then I partied really hard for a while. And then I got introspective and decided I wanted to date again. And then I dated again. And then I wound up alone again. And now here I am on the eve of my birthday blogging about my fucking record collection again.
Fabio Orsi
Osci
(SmallVoices ?– SVV006, 2006)
A. Osci 1 [MP3]
B. Osci 2
