Released on a very small scale and still currently available in a few good record shops in and around Dublin, The Day I Stopped Reading Wired is an extremely exiting debut. Recorded on a shoestring over a long period of time, this ambitious collection of dark instrumentals denotes great technical and creative maturity, with Josh O’Connor, Head Noise in chief, establishing his twisted sonic landscapes somewhere between minimal post rock and dub electronic in its most somber form, creating dense atmospheric structures on which he applies layers of distorted guitars and noise.
Reminiscent of the hazy clouds of sheer noise disturbance of My Bloody Valentine, this album deals with rough surfaces and edgy emotions in a much more modular way. None of the eight musical tracks – Wrong Planet being spoken – is straightforward. If the same composite elements of dub, post rock and ambient are used rather convincingly, the only constant of The Day I Stopped Reading Wired is the meticulous process of deconstruction carried out. Beats and other structures morph, start, stop, vanish in cataclysmic tectonic movements, perhaps better explained by the album opening line: “the universe has been in existence for over 170,000 million billion years and will be ending in a little over ten minutes time”. Ominous, The Day I Stopped… confronts the fear that human beings have toward death with cheer joy. This album, warns the cover, is a sonic experiment. It might as well be a life size psychological test for all one knows, digging deep in the subconscious of the listener to reveal the unhealthiest phobia. O’Connor’s inhospitable creations, organic in the life-form meaning of the word, seem to live just beneath the skin and feed obsessions. This album presents a schizophrenic concept of music, with very little connection to proper reality but for the fact of being captured on CD.
Drums, bass and treated guitar sounds form the backbone of the compositions. Melodies are scarce and perverted, the whole point being to subvert sounds. This doesn’t mean however that this album has no real purpose. In fact, the nature of the music here means that, although arid in form, this album is rich in concept, and manages to trigger endless imaginative patterns and questions psychological values.
Far from being pretentious or hermetic, The Day I Stopped Reading Wired offers some magnificent sonic moments. With dense soundscapes and atmospheric beats, Josh O’Connor puts together a very promising first album, which deserves to be snatched by a truly adventurous record label.