Asio otus – Visible
Published January, 2017
by Easterndaze
Asio otus’ latest album hovers on the liminal borders – oscillating in a ghostly non-space, a soundtrack to a landscape that is still and content with its non-suggestive desolateness. Asio otus is the moniker of Marton Toth, a Hungarian producer currently living and working in Portugal. This inter-residency, living in a space in-between, without being tied to any physical location or national identity is mirrored in Visible’s inter-genre delineations: using elements from footwork, dub, ambient, vaporwave, deconstructed club music. “In the end for me it’s all about the mood, texture, structure, balance and “stench” of each track, and how together they form an “essence” (which I imagine like excerpts of different environments),“ he says.
The album – which is his first – was produced over a period of 2-3 years and self-released on Bandcamp and Soulseek. The overarching quality of the record is a sense of hyper-meditation, a calming ambience with a fast tempo underneath it. This apparent contradiction works – accelerated beats are enveloped in eerie, foggy soundscapes, hypermodern worlds of turbo-capitalism and its invisible mechanisms of control, subverting it by inherently slowing it down.