April 15, 2022 - Emotional Software
Something simple, elegant. Something worthwhile and not easy. Something that demands your presence.
I’m not going to try and define what genre Portuguese producer Oma Nata’s Briefly Human sits within. It consists of four electronic tracks, and there are techno beats, no words, and vast ambient spaciousness. Each track is like a room, where the beat is the floor and the walls, and everything else is the chi, flowing freely into, around, and through the space, charging it like a battery, lighting up dead lightbulbs, startling spiders.
These songs stay loose in structure, unfold in unexpected narratives, and demand attention. The dance beats are attractive and comfortable to the mind like heartbeats, while the tones and patterns floating around the beats are unbridled and unafraid to clash. They run and bleed into each other like watercolors on silk, blending at the edges in both beauty and dissonance. Sometimes they are painful and drawn out to the point where they suspend you in controlled discomfort, asking you to maintain awareness of the disharmony. These moments are like flies in a horror movie soundtrack, tones two half steps apart, disconcerting to the psyche, taking it to an edge. The contrast between the painful and pleasing seems to be where Oma Nata wants you to sit and stay. He is a master of abstraction—he removes the words, removes the syntax, removes the patterns that are easy to dismiss, and all that’s left is a familiar mystery that we can’t look away from because we can’t solve its familiarity.
Like a sound bath of glass singing bowls or the euphoria of hours into a dark post-midnight dancefloor, the frequencies built up in all the tracks buzz the brain and elicit a physiological response (when listening alone with headphones). Oma Nata opens up the chakras with bitter medicine then sculpts tangible energy into brilliant light. It is some of the most exciting “ambient music” I have heard in a long time. ☔