//orangenoise – A Journey To The Heart of Matter

I don’t see how it could make any sense to anyone else. Perhaps if you possess the selfishness of an only child you’ll understand. Maybe if you tend to adopt and nurture inanimate objects and abstract concepts, you’ll understand. Could be you’ll understand anyway.

I was there when //orangenoise formed. Well, that’s not the clearest statement. Technically, I was ‘there’ when Slowdive formed, but I can’t speak about them with the same intimacy as I’m about to. No, by ‘there’, I mean I watched //orangenoise come together. The very name was created in front of my eyes (on the 1st of June 2010, fyi) (I was a bit iffy about the ‘orange’ bit the way I’m iffy about all major decisions).

FUN FACT: //orangenoise was almost called //Feedback before suspicions led to double-checking and the unsurprising discovery that the latter was already taken.

I’d known Talha Wynne for all of three months then. We’d become friends thanks to a ‘gaze community we both milled about in. He was putting together a new band in the wake of the dissolution of the last. Two years on I’ve watched //orangenoise be created and named, I’ve listened to them record and put out an EP (Veracious), remixes, some stuff in between, as well as work on solo material (Toll Crane, Alien Panda Jury). And I’ve done it all while, for the most part, not even being on the same continent as the band.

This is the point where I have to ask you to go back to the first paragraph and try, really TRY, to understand, why //orangenoise are ‘mine’.

Now I’m back where I belong and they’re RIGHT HERE (border control begs to differ) and after all this, I want nothing more than to just be able to reach out and be where the analog sounds are.

But I can’t because visas and politics, so I’ll make do by just talking about it.

Veracious was a astounding album, no doubt. If you’re not from Pakistan or India, you have to bear in mind that access to some of the amenities that many take for granted isn’t quite as natural in these parts. The power doesn’t stay on, recording studios aren’t terribly common, equipment is expensive, audiences are nicher, and, most significantly, music production isn’t a common or an encouraged skill. Veracious stoutly defied whatever would have held it back. Until I heard A Journey To The Heart of Matter I thought Veracious had achieved the almost impossible. Hooks, clarity, diversity, and (shoegazey) tradition – it was all there.

But Journey is jaw-dropping. We’d had a teaser a few months back in the form of ‘Clipped’, and then, more recently, they dropped the opener ‘I Don’t Know‘. At the time we heard ‘Clipped’, we had no idea there was an album coming up, but it was obvious that Veracious was long gone. The ‘Clipped’ we heard was recorded live for LussunTV and even in that unforgiving setting it was proof positive that //ON had hit and crossed its adolescence with astonishing velocity. What paranormal hormones gave ‘Clipped’ its barely believable maturity so soon after we’d heard Veracious‘s to-be-expected innocence?

Wait till you hear the album version, though. Re-recorded and re-produced, it enhances nuances you didn’t realise existed as it spins, churns, and tumbles, with something hypnotic in its agility. It’s follow-up, ‘Chaser’ is similar and endowed with less of a hook, and more of a somersault – it twists and winds into itself, rolling itself out just before it gets caught up in tangles. Aforementioned opener ‘I Don’t Know’ is a the pinnacle of sophistication. You can tell there’s sophistication in a song when it remembers that there’s sound in silence.

I could go on, speaking about each song in turn. But given my obvious bias, perhaps it’s better if you do some of the work yourself.