A Closer Listen
An okta is a unit of measurement used to describe cloud cover on a scale from zero to eight. Each point on the scale is then represented by divisions of a circle: an empty center for an empty sky, a completely filled circle for an overcast gray. Noah Ophoven-Baldwin’s 0 Oktas is a clear blue sky: unremarkable at first, but increasingly foreign, a series of apparently static phenomena that become strange and inscrutable as you look and look and look.
Living with 0 Oktas is like listening to someone repeat a word over and over again until it loses its everyday meaning. Like all good and mysterious things it somehow defies exposition: if I told you that a few sputtered, breathy cornet notes and some sparse field recordings can create something with the power to re-contextualize your everyday life, would you believe me? Dubbed “a sort of proof of concept” for the new Minneapolis-based label All Sky, 0 Oktas inaugurated the label in September alongside Luke Martin’s by our faint shadows going before us, an equally sparse, reflective, and place-based ensemble album on which Ophoven-Baldwin also plays a significant role.
0 Oktas is not just sound: it is also words and images. In a brief and equally sparse booklet that accompanies the record, a series of gnomic utterances unfold next to apparently mundane pictures of the overcast sky. Although difficult to interpret at first, the simplicity and insistence with which these words and images return to the sky, the clouds, and the process of looking gives them a certain weight and clarity, a certain focus that can’t help but reorient that of the reader:
“I’m not sure what it is now but it feels like the best for some time and given
all that it is about with how things are (and the rest) and of course not
without the clouds, the lights, the stars, and the planes in the sky and how
they are now but every day I look up at the sky”
Musically, 0 Oktas functions in much the same way. I’m reminded of a (perhaps apocryphal) story told to me by a friend who had heard the composer Eva-Maria Houben give a lecture. Her music, she said, was like a duck diving under the water: even when you can’t perceive it, you know it’s there, swimming along somewhere. You know it will resurface if you give it time. Although the winding strings of quiet call and response on by our faint shadows going before us are more sustainably compelling to me than the austerity of 0 Oktas, there is something intense and disarming about Ophoven-Baldwin’s exploration of a very, very limited palette. While it may not lend itself to repeated listens, a thoughtful listener will find a few moments of real surprise hidden among the room noise and pseudo-silences.
Sound, language, and life paired down to a select few fundamentals. Although I feel I may never return to the world of 0 Oktas, I will, in a sense, carry it forward with me, to resurface like a misplaced duck. Lately, I’ve been looking at the sky. (Peter Tracy)
Sat Nov 04 00:01:00 GMT 2023