OOFJ is an intriguing moniker, but it stands for Orchestra of Jenno I believe, the name of the first band of Danish instrumentalist Jens Bjørnkjær, who was getting very busy behind his table of electronics also occupied by a saxophone, a trumpet and a flute. OOFJ is actually a duo, and the second half is Katherine Mills Rymer who does the vocals, ethereal and a bit on a sad note, while always staying mysterious, just like their moniker.
The electronic duo was playing an in-store at Amoeba on Thursday night and the first idea that came to my mind when I first heard their eerie compositions was movie soundtrack… The combination of Bjørnkjær’s complex soundscapes and Rymer’s delicate and often pain-inducing murmur has effectively a very cinematic effect, but if their music could be used for a movie it would have to be foreign – she is from South Africa, he is from Denmark – or very strange – in an interview, they have admitted their love for Lynch’s movie (but honestly which musician doesn’t like him?) but also for Ingmar Bergman’s work,… plus, they met in New York while Bjørnkjær was working on music for Lars von Trier’s Melancholia! In the middle of this international medley, they bounded over ‘all things Russian’, and their series of videos on YouTube are certainly worth checking out, for their bizarreness and disorientating nonsense, combining enchantment and fright.
The electronic duo is also a romantic duo, and their complicity was real live, her sensual lament, closer to sadness than simple melancholia, was haunting his desolated compositions, which were part electronic, part symphonic, sometimes even grand, with very emotional synthetic strings, an omnipresent bass-like sound and an occasional horn, sax or trumpet that he was playing with real instruments, recording loops and making them fade away with some computer manipulation.
If there were beats they were not really inviting to dance, they felt like danger while Katherine Rymer was making this strange nervous shaky dance, or jogging movements on the spot, running away from an imaginary threat, escaping from a menacing pulsar. There also was a curious contrast between her lugubrious moan going between Bjork, Thom Yorke, and Lana Del Rey and his visible pleasure at sculpting these adventurous sonic sceneries, bringing painful emotion while often staying cold and alien. Their last song, ‘Snakehips’ was slightly more upbeat and light-mooded, and she called it a summer song for cocktails, while their video for the song is made out of a clip of the 30’s, showing Earl ‘Snakehips’ Tucker doing incredible dance moves, and keep it in mind, that this was happening more than 50 years before Michael Jackson… Plus, they have an album called ‘Disco to Die To’, so forget about the desperate Radiohead-Portishead-ish emotional vibes, OOFJ may well be a dance band after all.
More pictures of the show here
