Ovro - Mosaick The Serpent / Vipera Aurea

Fascinating! After two well received EPs recorded with Niko Skorpio under the moniker of Haeretici 7o74, Finland's Ovro records her second full length album (double album in fact), on the increasingly popular Some Place Else.

Ovro is a Female artist, doing experimental, psychological and cryptic ambient electronica. That alone is a rarity, as only a handful of female artists can say the same (Gydja, of "Clear Stream Temple" springs to mind).

For someone relatively new to electronic music to work with an Icon such as Niko Skorpio is respectable to begin with. Not only is Niko a legend to Finnish Electronica, he also helped to found the Doom Metal genre, being a member of the project Thergothon.

This makes him alone the second most important man in Finnish Music, after Mikko Aspa (Clandestine Blaze, Grunt, Nicole 12, Alchemy of the 20th Century, Stabat Mater, to name but a few).

Enough to give anyone food for thought, and Ovro does exactly that. Not content with just releasing original and inspiring music, she pours her heart into her packages, surrounding all of her songs with her own creations of artwork, liner notes, and lyrical anomalies.

This is a twinned double album, with the theme of Serpents not only echoing the disc titles, but dominating the entire package. One of the pieces of artwork has a similarity to the six Chakras, and the Kundalini, which as most of you know is depicted as a Coiled Serpent.

Lets go to the first half of the release, "Mosaick the Serpent". Elongated and Inspired song titles such as "Primogenitural Echoes" and "Differentiation Irrevocable" do little to take the veil of mystery away, and when one opens the liner notes to find litanies such as "White Dog, Blackened South, Millions dead to reason. Burning but not sign from God, Thinking the new Treason", it becomes crystal clear that we are not to expect anything even close to conventional.

Ovro prides herself on originality, and the album delivers that. The first track offers us brooding ambience, with the kind of eerie whistles you only hear from wind sweeping through tin tunnels. A very bizarre and horrific sound hits us at the end before the now obligatory sample of some speech recording or another.

Ovro is not afraid to use vocals either, and it is so pleasing to hear Female vocals in this kind of music. Special mention to "Equation Impossible" for a new lesson in bleak.

After the first six tracks (and the respective end of Mosaick the Serpent), we are offered four nameless, 3 second long "interludes", which I won't comment on.

How does "Vipera Aurea" expect to possibly compare to such a length of madness? The quote from Lewis Carroll's legendary "Jabberwocky" answers that.

"Vorpal Angel" - best song title ever. But let's go to "Scarlet Calls" first. Intimidating, female dominance at its strongest. A Male voice singing, very slowly (almost choral like) "Relax Baby, it will only hurt a little" over, and over again. Not one to play at a family gathering then. Pure electronic chaos, and almost noise, in the sense of there being just a montage of sound and samples.
So back to Vorpal Angel. THIS is what I call electronic! Incredible sounds!

This review as it stands, only describing a handful of the sixteen tracks, tells you all you need to know. I assume you're on the site already ordering this. If you're not, I suggest you do so. The label site is above.

Freaks, BUY this. Fans of dance-worthy, regulated electronic, stay away. Dec 01 2006