A collaborative album featuring members of Action Beat, Bad Body and helmed by the incomparable G.W. Sok, OMA is the second recording to be issued by Tombed Visions that is the product of experimentations generated at the legendary WORM Studios in Rotterdam. Moving from strafing, disquieting techno, impassioned spoken word and ghostly ambience, it is the brevity of OMA’s run time that marks its success as hallucinatory audial trip. ‘Aberfan’ deals with the notorious Welsh landslide disaster of 1966, G.W Sok delivery intoned with the weight of survivors guilt and a world weariness earned from the injustice of preventable catastrophe. The bell chimes and cathedral organs that end the track wooze with the kind of saccharine, redemptive awfulness that characterise the empty sentiments of politicians and mining authorities at the time of the tragedy. Sok leads the charge again on album ender ‘Hospital’, half shouting “Can you hear the dogs crying from hunger?” as bass drum and floor toms hit the mid-section and head like a drunken brawler fighting through a mist of noxious gas. It has the atmospheric dread of a prison beating. Bianca Biblioni’s golden vocals on ‘Black Mirror’ act as an antidote to these two oppressive tracks, melding with a haze of sun drenched synths that hint at a distant euphoria. ‘Juno’ opens the album with throaty and roiling synths, the beat these melodies lie a top carrying an infectious rhythm that wouldn’t sound out of place on John Carpenter’ seminal Assault on Precinct 13 OST, albeit with a Giallo score sheen. The material the group generated over the long weekend of their residency would have been vast, but again, OMA’s surgical scalping and forming of the music into a tightly woven 25 minutes full of differing pace, mood and atmosphere means they’ve managed to touch on more pools of sound than many in the experimental electronic scene take a whole oeuvre to explore.

""OMA" sounds like a pulsating backflash in a time when Krautrock's hot shit and psychotropic substances were still in vogue because anyway everything was new, or at least within tangible, promising closeness. We notice every day that there is really nothing left of this expedient optimism. A life in the loop of perpetually re-chewing pasts, in a society that seems to know nothing but envy and greed and the self-deprecating, the body on a machine reducing dictum of absolute self-realization. That's why this is a four-piece mini-album of a group consisting of band members of Action Beat and Bad Boy, complemented by former The-Ex front man GW Sok. The latter left the Dutch anarcho-punk band a few years ago to pursue their own, perhaps more digestible ways of getting older. That's it. The collective around OMA has made an incredibly interesting tape with their self-titled debut release on Tombed Visions - somewhere between spoken word and ghostly ambient with dull, repressed rumblings. Claustrophobic pieces are the result of several sessions at the famous WORM Studios in Rotterdam. Without light and sun, a bleak picture of nihilism dressed in black. The anxiety is still approachable, the threat still rare, but the fear as a controlling constant real. "Aberfan," for example: rushing waves, intangible, but there. Sok gives a text that refers to the eponymous site in Wales, where in 1966 a landslide over 100 people buried under him. His voice is sober, his tone harsh, you probably feel reminded of Mark E. Smith. Black Mirror, on the other hand, is a spherical corset, fleetingly floating. Hi-hats, pointed like small needles, are constantly measuring themselves with the angelic, almost eternally repressed vocals of Bianca Biblioni. Contrast is contrast is contrast. Nice opened and a real recommendation!"
- Skug

"A short but exceptionally powerful set of recordings from the informal OMA collective. The crew, led by The Ex’s G.W. Sok and backed up by members of Tombed Visions alumni Action Beat and Bad Body, mixes samples, viscous electronics, heartfelt vocals and spoken word texts in a rich and satisfying stew that packs a real emotional punch. And if the diversity of its sonic palette means ‘OMA’ veers all over the place during its 20-minute runtime, that ain’t necessarily a bad thing. Each track plunges you deep into its sound-world from the get-go and the resulting listening experience is like wandering through a gallery in which each room is a distinct installation, establishing its own parameters and playing by its own rules. And the fact that one feels energised rather than exhausted while digging into it is credit to the imagination and restraint of its personnel.

The two spoken word cuts hit hardest on initial listens, although things balance out with further exposure. ‘Aberfan’ features a text by Jon Longford, slightly adapted by Sok, which deals with the catastrophic events of October 1966 in which 116 children and 28 adults perished. An unnamed narrator recalls the events of that day from his vantage point in the present, the pictures of devastation as fresh in his mind as the trauma yet unresolved. “The rain poured all night, and a teetering slagheap slid down the mountain and engulfed the classrooms to which the kids had just returned after singing All Things Bright And Beautiful in morning assembly,” he remembers, as surging beds of electronics swirl around him, evoking both the dreadful torrent and his own psychological torment. A coda featuring chiming church bells and devotional synth chords sidesteps cheese thanks to careworn textures that avoid shallow optimism while lightening the darkness a little.

The experience of the protagonist of ‘Hospital’, while not quite as severe, is still disturbing. “First we’re going to get in the bath, the nurse said. Aren’t you ashamed to come to the hospital so filthy?” he recounts. The implication that the narrator is a marginalised figure is clear, although it soon becomes obvious that the duty of care one might expect from a hospital has been transformed into a nightmare of institutional control. “You’re good for nothing, nothing at all,” shouts the doctor “You come here to eat eggs, you’re a parasite … don’t you know how much it all costs?” Underneath a kickdrum marks a stentorian rhythm and electronics moan and squeal as if under extreme duress. There’s your hostile environment, right there.

The remaining tracks provide some respite to the heavy vibes. But the solace they offer is distinctly icy, the kind of frozen calm you might get while grabbing a sneaky fag round the back of the abbatoir mid-shift. ‘Juno’ is has a nicely dystopian shuffle, propelled by a skittering hi-hat and lurching bass drum that leave enough space for the synths to carve elegant, glacial arcs. ‘Black Mirror’, meanwhile, is a moody techno stormer whose supple, fierce grooves nod to Detroit, especially the afrofuturist visions of Carl Craig’s ‘More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art’. Bianca Biblioni’s echoing vocal lines drift through the liquid silver melodies like a fish in the water, as that smartass hi-hat programmer knocks out subtly insistent patterns that are answered by the kickdrum’s morse-code thump. As smooth and cold as a pint of Guinness."
- Paul Margree, We Need No Swords