Temporary Super Offer! *2024 stock* When it comes to music, proximity can be a difficult thing. We want great artists to stand apart – above it all, yet we need them to be close enough, and often associated enough, for us to understand and discover their work. As is often the case, time heals distance and wounds, ushering artists who have long stood apart into the fold. If the resize market has fulfilled anything, it is this task. In this light, we encounter Roger Doyle, who’s masterful debut from 1975 – a largely unacknowledged electroacoustic marvel, sits before us now. Roger is an experimental composer, improviser, pianist, drummer and electroacoustic innovator, who represents pivotal becoming of the Irish avant-garde – marginalized in his homeland, while embraced the forward minds of electronic and computer experimentation on the continent. As an artist, he has always tread the uncomfortable juncture between the meeting of divergent creative worlds – free jazz, avant-garde classical, electronic music, soundtracks, and particularly within his project Operating Theatre, founded in 1980 with Olwen Fouéré, their relation to with theatre, punk, new wave, and industrial music. 

The album which emerged as Oizzo No in 1975, is a culmination of Doyle’s student years at the Royal Irish Academy Of Music in Dublin – a survey of the wild places youth takes the mind. It is a wild, wonky body of musique concrete and electronic  process created between the Institute of Sonology at the University of Utrecht in Holland, and EMS Studios in Stockholm, which while standing entirely outside of what we understand about the Irish contest of experimental music, singularly and seamlessly joins to the larger history of this territory of sounds.

Created from a startling and thrillingly playful pallet of sounds and structures, each work contained within Oizzo No culminates against the next with a tension build from difference, while speaking as a collective whole. A stunning debut, originally issued in a limited edition of 500 copies, before slipping into obscurity, this is one of those records we can’t thank Cacophonic enough for bring back into the light of day, offering it the context and proximity it has always deserved. Yet another beautiful LP as 2018 inches toward its close. Grab this fast before it goes.