Music Recommendations, Essential And Obscure: Ott

This guy Ott, I'd never heard of until a couple years ago, is incredible. He's involved in three of my all time favorite CDs. They are European imports, and hard to find used because nobody would want to get rid of them. All three are essential and easily worth the cost and effort of digging them up.

The first one I was introduced to was the incredible 'Are You Shpongled?' by Shpongle. Shpongle is a collaboration between Simon Posford, a trance producer and electronic musician, and Raja Ram, a flutist and electronic hippy. Ott was not part of the act but did edit and arrange the album. Doesn't seem like a big role until you hear how much better it is than the other Shpongle releases where Ott was not involved. (I generally love and recommend Shpongle and Posford's other projects, but 'Are You Shpongled' is a stand-out.) 'Are You Shpongled' is dynamic and lively, drawing on Eastern, Latin, dub, ambient, and psychedelic styles. Great care is taken to craft detailed sonic landscapes, and complex, evolving, organic music, that takes you on a mind bending ride.

This lead me to another Simon Posford project: 'Hallucinogen In Dub'. Hallucinogen is the name Posford used to do 4/4 trance music, but Ott applied his signature tripped-out dubby remix signature to a bunch of these tracks, adding subtlety and complexity, resulting in another incredible musical trip.

Finally Ott's own 'Blumenkraft' release was a collection of tracks he had created over years and finally compiled into a release. There is a track or two weaker than the rest but it's still a CD I wouldn't be without.

There is much anticipation for his new album, Skylon, which will be his first solo work that was created to be a cohesive album. I speculate that this will be consistent with his other work and an essential listening experience.

To find these CDs, you may get lucky and find a deal on Ebay, Half, or Amazon. Psyshop and Amazon UK are pretty reasonable sources.