Oh Astro 'Champions of Wonder' album

The Illegal Art record label continues to birth its Negativland-inspired, Deconstructing Beck credentialed and Girl Talk reinforced releases into a world where copyright laws are beginning to crumble. Case in point – the label will release new albums from two of its roster artists – Oh Astro and Realistic in the coming weeks. Listeners should take note of the Oh Astro track “Hello Fuji Boy” which features a sample from Lionel Richie’s infamous tune “Hello” immortalized in the wonderful video featuring a blind sculptress creating a model of Mr. Richie’s oversized noggin. The song appears on the band’s groundbreaking new album Champions of Wonder.

XLR8R recently chimed in with some early praise for the record, saying: “In true Illegal Art fashion, Jane Dowe and Hank Hofler’s first full-length as Oh Astro is comprised almost solely of sampled material, but this is far from a Girl Talk record. Champions of Wonder is an experimental conglomeration of glitchy techno, ambient, and broken-beat, all layered with distorted vocals that offset the album’s poppier moments with ghostly eeriness.” Also not to be missed is the album’s exquisite cover of Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu.”

The way-ahead-of-the-game publication also recently praised the upcoming Jib Door release of the retro-futuristic self-titled collaboration of comic book beats and rhymes between Chicago producer Yea Big and rapper Kid Static. Coincidentally, Big also appears on the upcoming Oh Astro record, lending his skills to three of the album’s tracks (one is a significant remix of a track from his debut release, The Wind That Blows The Robots Arms.) XLR8R says: “This LP is worth listening to just for Deejay Yea Big’s production. Stuttering, glitchy, and just plain jaw-dropping, Yea Big’s beats are up there with the big guns of Prefuse 73 and Daedelus. With Kid Static’s humorous, yet angst-filled rhyming filling it out, this duo have put excitement and innovation back into hip-hop.”

biography
Married duo Jane Dowe and Hank Hofler are both rooted firmly in experimental music, but with the Oh Astro project they continue their move towards odd interpretations of popular forms. Club music, children’s songs, and fragmented samples of pop/rock all intersect on their first full-length album, Champions of Wonder, under the Oh Astro banner.

Jane Dowe entered the international electronic music scene in 1998 on two critical CD releases, Institutional Collaborative on Mille Plateaux, and Deconstructing Beck on Illegal Art. On Institutional Collaborative, Dowe and Terre Thaemlitz created abstract music that was described as a “table-tennis mixing game with ‘lounge’ and ambient soundclips” (The Wire). Dowe resurfaced in 2005 on Illegal Art with the debut Oh Astro mini-album, Hello World, which was hailed as “funky and pretty, Hello World's bite-sized samples concoct a weird pop universe” (CMJ New Music Monthly). While Hank Hofler peripherally contributed to the project, it wasn't until after Hello World that he became significant collaborator in Oh Astro. Besides creating music Dowe has also done installations in galleries internationally and codes idiosyncratic software for her various projects.

Hank Hofler’s first performances were in Japan as part of the live electronic improvisation scene from 1998-2001, playing shows with Japanese artists such as Otomo Yoshihide, Merzbow, Ikue Mori, and Sawako. As Dowe was too shy for live events, Hank's earliest shows were actually performing as “Jane Dowe” (further confusing the identity of the pseudononymous Dowe). As he developed his own reputation, Hofler began to be billed under his own name, began street performing in Tokyo, and later also took on the live shows for Oh Astro. As a tenure-track professor, Hofler currently teaches in an Arts Technology program at Illinois State University. Both Hofler and Dowe hold advanced degrees from prestigious institutions such as Dartmouth College and Keio Univeristy (Japan), but have strong reservations about the esoteric qualities of academic art/music.

Also appearing on Champions of Wonder is part-time member Stefen Robinson, who releases under the Yea Big moniker. Robinson's most recent release is the glitch hop Yea Big + Kid Static on Jib Door/Locust featuring the vocals of Chicago artist Kid Static.

Robinson was a key collaborator on the Oh Astro debut and likewise collaborates on three tracks on Champions of Wonder (one is a significant remix of a track from his debut release, The Wind That Blows The Robots Arms). Other guests include two of Dowe and Hofler's children. Lucy, age 7, does a rendition of a children's song that is transformed through the harmonic content of popular songs from the 1940s/50s. Likewise a candid recording of their daughter Ella, singing an improvised made-up lyric, is filtered through a Japanese children's song. Dowe also sings on the album with a strangely beautiful cover of Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu.”

Shortly after the release of Hello World in 2005, Oh Astro was asked to do a remix for the UK band ROC. The astounding remix was described as an ”unhinged mesmeric house version” and the most club friendly track the group had ever produced. It was released on 12" by the UK label 12 Apostles. Following that trend, Champions of Wonder, contains a few tracks that while still being somewhat tweaked, will bring instant pleasure to the dancefloor.

The purposely-pixilated digipak artwork for Champions of Wonder was created by the internationally known producer/artist Terre Thaemlitz utilizing illustrations by Aiko Tsuji. The physical release also contains surround sound mixes of the first three tracks by Aaron Paolucci (who also mastered the stereo mixes) that can be played on a computer connected to a 5.1 sound system.

One of the common techniques on Champions of Wonder is the manipulation of vocals by spectral software that is coded by Dowe and long-time mentor Christopher Penrose. Even the more experimental or ambient tracks contain ghostly sounds of vocals that have been stripped from their original context and placed into the pulsating electronic world of Oh Astro. The other common practice on the album is that every sound, with the exception of some of the vocals, is sampled from pre-existing recordings. The types of music sampled range from top 40 songs to indie hipster music to the obscure. In the end, it's more about what is done with the sample than what was originally sampled.

With this release Illegal Art continues to challenge the restrictions of copyright as perceived by the larger music industry. The uniqueness of Oh Astro, along with other artists on the label (Girl Talk, Realistic, Steinski, P. Miles Bryson, Wobbly, Christopher Penrose, etc.), further illustrates that sample-based music is strikingly some of the most original, innovative, and exciting music being made in the 21st century. Illegal Art claims Fair Use for all of its releases and has professional legal counsel nearby if needed.

press quotes
“Mimicking the loop-based strategies of pop but giving them her own unique twist, Dowe trade her former ambient experiments for something that’s at the same time accessible and mind boggling, and always enjoyable to hear.” XLR8R

“’Circuits Gleam’ sounds exactly like its title — shimmering truncated melodies flirting jaggedly like two butterflies dancing until it winds down and tips off.” Exclaim!

“Jane Dowe jerry-rigged her own software to create music that mirrored the ghostly clicks, piercing pops and quark-sized samples of experimental electronica, but loops all the little blurbs as if she were making pop songs.” CMJ New Music Monthly

“While it doesn’t hurt that the Oh Astro project starts off with solid source material, it succeeds on its own merits. Highly recommended.” Grooves

“The six songs on this EP flow like adrenaline to the frontal lobe, from the hip-twisting whip of ‘Everything Is Go!’ to the ADD sweat of ‘All My Favorite’ to the alien paranoia of ‘Circuits Gleam.’” Venus

“Jane Dowe (a.k.a. Oh Astro) takes a bold-faced turn to blurted hip-hop washes and sheer colorific robotica on Hello World. Jane’s gone wild in this blurification of assumed crappy 80’s faux soul..." Igloo

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Oh Astro - Champions of Wonder