Hen Ogledd : DISCOMBOBULATED
It wasn’t until the fifth track “End of the Rhythm” that I was finally sold on DISCOMBOBULATED, the third record by improv electronic group Hen Ogledd. Up until that track, it had been four tracks of abstract ambient music, the occasional horn and acoustic drum, group and solo vocals with heavy British accents that make them feel amateurish, married to synth patches that feel like listening to “All of the Lights” played in a dorm room on a KORG mini piano. In truth, I nearly turned it off during the eight-minute second track “Scales Will Fall,” which retains that mid-tempo pre-psychosis Kanye vibe for its duration. But the placid flow of the rapped vocal slowly began to win me over, marrying itself to the comfortably avant-garde backing music, which added layers by micro-accretions until, by the end, there is a complex roiling set of improvisations set against steady written rhythms and recurring melodies. The feeling reveals itself by the end to be sunny and bright, or maybe brite instead, like a digital ray over sheets of ice before the warm.
The dark athleticism of “End of the Rhythm” bursts out after nearly 20 minutes of material, upping the tempo to something that cooks set with rising choir vocals that call to mind those swelling epics of Kamasi Washington’s aptly titled The Epic as if played by circa-1980 Talking Heads with Adrian Belew guitar scraggle all over. If any song could be taken as a viable single from an experimental record, it would be this one, which absolutely bursts with life, feeling often more like an arbitrarily clipped four minutes from the densest heart of a half-hour Afrobeat jam than a discrete piece of music. The improvisational chops of Richard Dawson’s ensemble, not to be confused with our equally loved Dawn Richard, shows itself in full force here. My comment about Afrobeat epics isn’t a stray allusion either; one gets the sense that this piece in particular could stretch out to infinity in a live context, allowing almost infinite instrumental overlays and solos, building and building forever.
Everything on the record is a setup for the epic “Clear Pools,” the penultimate track on the album. It is a proper prog epic, with many shifting smaller pieces, recurring melodies, and a great clash of styles. It is largely built around folk and ambient music, but lingering jazz lines, proper electronic riffs and the hovering poeticism that begins to worm its way into your ear over the course of the record all make themselves known. The structuralism here is fascinating to me; given how instantly charismatic this performance is, one might more naturally place it first, letting that wide epic prime your ear to enjoy each of the smaller experiments and compositions to follow. They obviously took the opposite approach; the album starts with its least admitting work as it slowly works its way open, creating this fascinating audio illusion that you are understanding their approach better and better when in actuality they are going easier and easier on you. The epic, the other obvious high point of the record, slides effortlessly into closing piece “Land of the dead,” with its lingering sitar drones and new age synthesizer pads and spoken word poetry against those jazz entanglements that color the harmonic language of the piece.
Suddenly, you press play for your second go and its like a light got flipped on. What once felt avant-garde and almost amateurish suddenly feels intuitive and charismatic, individuated, while previous high points suddenly feel like radiant bursts of light. DISCOMBOBULATED is a perfect example of the power of patience in music, where a wise artist or group teaches you how to listen to it so that your return trip breaks open only ever wider. The first time I heard Sun Ra or Albert Ayler it was much the same, a cacophony that teaches you how to read it; working through James Joyce and the more abstracted wing of Virginia Woolf’s work is much the same. DISCOMBOBULATED is a delight, as meditative as it is vibrant, able to switch comfortably back and forth between these two moods like an afternoon in the sunshine watching birds and dogs and children and insects laughing, dancing, playing.
Label: Weird World
Year: 2026
Similar Albums:
