Track: Osees – ‘Scramble Experiment’

THE HIGHLY prolific psych-beasts Osees, formerly Thee Oh Sees, are back with more after the release of their album Protean Threat earlier this year.

“Scramble Experiment”, the opener of their second album of the year, serves up the band’s recognisable garage boisterousness, the drumming as cataclysmic as ever. It is also a class in Osees’ ludicrously creative stride, remixing Protean Threat’s “Scramble Suit” into a grinding stomp replete with scintillating guitars, it’s bustling and clattering assault accelerated by “samples of farm equipment and some found sounds …”.

The upcoming album, with it’s wryly anagrammatic title of the Osees’ previous release, is somewhat of a sister to Protean Threat. Bandleader John Dwyer spent the making of Panther Rotate in a creative dervish of “swirling and undulant warm mud of jettisoned reels of magnetic tape”, with nightly exercises in which he would “parley with my pilots and run and rerun the recordings.”; hence the sizzled psychedelic spool of Protean Threat became “Panther Rotate in the other dimension.”

Though this may simply sound like a crude reworking of the band’s brilliant 2020 album, it is in fact another bountifully expansive and refreshing project: “A companion LP of remixes, field recordings, and sonic experiments using all sounds generated by the hum and crackle of the desert farm.”

“A second version of our Protean Threat if you will, but barely conspicuous in its relation.

“Forward, never straight!

“Sunrise, sunset.

“Two lives connected by a cosmic thread,

“One for your feet and one for your head.”

Panther Rotate is out on Castle Face Records on December 11th, with an incredibly limited run of Kyle Ranson’s cover artwork in a lenticular reimagining; see the tracklist and artwork below; if you’re in the UK, you can place an order with Piccadilly Records, here. Also below, enjoy the similarly kaleidoscopic spectacle of Scrambled Experiment’s video.