Ossia - Devil’s Dance (2019)

Boomkat Product Review:
Soundboy supreme, Ossia sends us reeling with an immense debut album of technoid dub brutalism for his staunch allies at Blackest Ever Black. A massive RIYL Demdike Stare, Wasteland, Jay Glass Dubs, The Bug, Jon Hassel...

Long in the works and properly worth the wait, ‘Devil’s Dance’ is a deliriously strong summation of Ossia’s singular style. Dread-filled and fevered, it marks the Bristol/Berlin-hailing producer as a master at negotiating negative space and bending styles to his will, taking what he needs from grime & dubstep, jazz, techno and post-industrial music, and warping it all with an uncanny sleight of hand that only comes from proper dedication to dub craft.

Most brilliantly, nothing is square or regular in Ossia’s sound world. Edges are consistently smudged and slanted, sounds bleed into one another with organic form, but, like a backyard/spareroom ganja farmer, his skill lies in pruning punctuations, allowing his forms to grow wild, whilst knowing where and when to cut and splice. Now harvested, his crop is effectively a highly potent batch with a perfect balance of meditative and psychoactive content.

From the gauntleted noise sculpture of ‘Concrete’, to the weightless skank and skronk of ‘Radiation’, thru the heaving masses of his ‘Devil’s Dance’ and ‘Hell Version’, thru the spectral ephemera of ‘Inertia’ and the 23 minutes of perceptive chicanery in ‘Vertigo’, you have one of the strongest dub records you'll hear for time.