After taking a minute and half of improvised Hawaiian lap steel (the Oahu of the title) playing, and submitting it to a beyond epic piece of postal processing, Dutch electronic heads Freiband & Machinefabriek created solo pieces using twenty half-minute chunks of transmuted source sounds. The foundation of the Oahu?s dampened slide guitar sound, the sample source is inoffensive to the point of dullness if truth be told, is rendered pretty much inconsequential for much of these two pieces. It seems an odd move though to reveal the original sound used, despite the fact that they built their mixes from further developed, and possibly utterly different, samples.

On Freiband?s ?2.1? he uses the material to generate an atmosphere of cracked clouds, his turning loops sonaring open-handed tinnitus ring. When he opens up some in-the-red noise parts the sound becomes too cluttered, his softer moments allowing the crossover of sections to come through untroubled. The reliance of a repetitive dull toll and the rudiments of sucking glitch sounds gives the track an air the accidental and unplanned, where the more melodic and simple Machinefabriek take feels a lot more purposefully crafted. It?s only on ?2.2?s final third that the Oahu?s notes appear to be used ?clean?, albeit restructured and staggered by Machinefabriek into a jilting new melody. ?Oahu? is definitely a worthwhile experiment, Machinefabriek?s creation a partial success, but the disc might?ve proffered more remarkable rewards if they?d used the original guitar sound as the source, instead of transforming it first. 5/10 -- Scott McKeating (15 April, 2008)