2026
My cover for 'Oversail', the new album from Ochre, with amazing coloured vinyl from Mystic Quantum Records.
https://ochre.bandcamp.com/album/oversail
Some background to the album:
If Understory, Ochre's 2020 album, explored the dappled, dazzling rhythms of the deep forest, Oversail offers us the feeling of the first steps out of the woods. We move upward and outward into exposed terrain, open skies, and weather-worn structures suspended between ruin and hope. In this new release, Ochre once again crafts a world that is both intimate and vast: melodic fragments drift through skeletal frameworks of rhythms, which creak and sway like ancient machinery still tenaciously alive. A pared-down ensemble of hardware synths, effects and drum machines form a cabled network of chittering, singing devices with stories to tell.
Inspired in part by a chapter from Iain M. Banks' novel Look to Windward, Guy Warley's visual direction draws a landscape crossed by abandoned cable cars. The vast pylons stand like monuments against the horizon, while fragile cable lines shiver across the changing landscape. The cars themselves, relics of a forgotten age, weave forward, powered by the wind. Storm floods have torn down parts of the network, leaving gaps -- interruptions in the journey that speak of time, decay, and endurance.
Yet Oversail does not dwell solely in desolation. The terrain here is alive. There is movement everywhere. Wind in the trees, water over rock, sound across silence. Like the artwork for Understory, the sense of adventure remains central: a quiet, solitary movement through time and distance.
Ochre's music becomes the seemingly-delicate but resilient vehicle that carries the listener across this expanse. Melodies fold and unfold like the sails of the cable cars catching air; textures shift like clouds; beats echo like distant pulses from towers long thought abandoned. Together, sound and image invite the listener to travel, to explore, to ascend.
