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Dec 10, 2020 Osees By Caleb Campbell

It’s not like Osees to take a break. After releasing September’s excellent Protean Threat and Metamorphosed, another album’s worth of songs from the Face Stabber sessions, John Dwyer’s inventive garage psych band has returned with a full album of remixes entitled Panther Rotate. The band’s newest record reinvents, Protean Threat, one of their most straightforward punk releases to date, as a beguiling hypnotic set of completely new songs. Stream the full album a day early below.

Though Protean Threat was weird and wild in all the best ways, it also was one of Osees’ most direct releases in recent memory. Panther Rotate chops those songs up, turns them around, and fills them with field recordings and technological trickeries. Panther Rotate is filled with moments such as the ambient electronic experimentation of “Synthesis” or the dancey reinvention of “Toadstool Experiment.” The band created the record at the same time as Protean Threat, laying down a track by day, and pulling the mix apart by night. The result is a fascinating vision of the band’s work, seemingly deconstructing and reforming as you listen to it.

Listen to an early stream of the record below, a day before its wide release on December 11 via John Dwyer’s Castle Face Records.

You can also get tickets for the band’s December 19 livestream performance here and read John Dwyer’s exclusive track-by-track walkthrough of the album below.

Basically when you are living in a studio in the middle of nowhere your brain starts to get the compound flu.

The outside world takes on a haze that doesn’t really play into your day to day while you are writing or working (at least if I’m doing it right it’s like this for me personally) We had a lot of time and equipment at our disposal and it was right at the beginning of quarantine when we started chipping away at this idea.

Seemed the perfect time to be ambitious as art and love are the only ways for me to fight this world’s whims right now and keep myself sane.

I have plenty of time to read the news and feel the burden after the studio but during this couple weeks we just threw ourselves into it

So here it is broken down track by track:

Scramble Experiment

The opening holler and subsequent laugh that opens the album is a secretly recorded sample of our engineer/producer Enrique being startled by a life size human child’s spooky face I hung outside his bathroom window, so when he turned the light on it was just there looking in from outside. :) You have to keep it interesting on the ranch. This one is such a heavy on the Protean Threat album that I wanted to give it a sort of drug-drag and slow things down and manipulate the general mood. I was thinking early Soft Machine here, in particular, “We Did it Again.” Repetition to build a fugue.

Don’t Blow Your Experiment

An Alice Cooper cover we did deconstructed. Opens with some field recordings and leans heavy into my love of Wendy Carlos for the intro

She is from my home town and holds a special place in my heart for electronic fundamentals and picking up the thread when I was a kid and first heard her music and renditions. (Her new biography is great BTW)

It just naturally morphed into tape loop kraut boogie which was quite fun to mess with. Complete with flute, synths, and clavinet

Synthesis

This is just a texture to get us from point B to point C
Buchla and samples
Inspired by frippertronics
Long delays become textures that are unpredictable if they are pulled far enough apart and beget happy accidents
You can improvise for days on this jaunt

Toadstool Experiment

So since this is a “remix” record we definitely started to wander down the path of dance music more than usual.
This one sort of naturally ended up bringing me back to selling acid at raves in Providence when I was a kid and back to acts like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin who I’ve always loved.
Hard to feel bad with this music on.
I added some lyrics to sort of make the song its own thing from the original on Protean Threat.

If I Had An Experiment

This one was fun.
Some field recording samples.
Was taking it a sort of Faust pop direction in my mind.
Huge fan.
But a bit more heavy contemporaries beat-wise like Container (fucking great x-Providence artist)
Again repetition equals hypo-ray.

Miz Experiment

Again Faust worship.
Short and sweet and maybe a bit of Tim Presley worship.
Decimate, repeat, decimate , repeat…. ad nauseum.
I’ve been loving these brittle guitar sounds lately.

Terminal Experiment

A blend of two outtakes.
This one is tough because the original on protein threat is such a basher.
So basically I just started by running the whole mix thru synths.
And then slowed it way down and redid the bass and cut it all up till it felt good.
The bass is definitely harkening back to Eddie Harris’ bass player on this wonderful perfect jam.

Wait for it…
Dude really shines here, Rufus Reid

Poem 2 With Horns

A sample of horns being played in the street outside of HR Giger’s home last year when we visited on tour.
Amazing place.
Good day.
With a poem that I wanted to fall into the weird and atmospheric areas of United States of America’s LP.
And again just a break for a breath between tunes.

Gong Experiment

You sometimes just have to close with a good pop track.
A shuffle with lots of samples of me breathing and mellotron.
Guitar shreddery a la Michael Karoli
I’d say it goes without saying that I worship his playing.
I wanted this one to have lots of body sounds percussively.

Then blows in the synths and an outro that definitely has a deep affection for the passed members of Can.

Holler

JPD