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Genealogy In 2001, the anti-supergroup, OX, began as an extra-curricular performance experiment. Based in Chicago, Ben Harbert, Russel “Rusty” O’Brien, Brent Rickles, and Eric “Slim” Murray created deconstructed music, a seeming outer-space soundtrack for the apocalypse. With vocals, profusely affected electric guitars, piecemeal drumset, and live sampling, OX plunges into fits and starts that congeal into crystalline soundscapes. From this bedlam there occasionally emerges a splinter of a tune like a plank thrown up by the sea. While most mergers of varied musical genres are done so to produce a utopian harmony that overcomes difference, OX’s musical realism showcases all by-products of musical pluralism—both the gorgeous and the repellent. Its members represent a diverse miscellany of style: indie rock, free jazz, straight jazz, heavy metal, country crooning, Americana, classical, and even Indian and Middle-Eastern music. On stage, OX irreverently plays with talents that, outside of their coalition, have earned them acclaim in their individual music careers. With OX, their music is an inspired mess—lazy front-porch melodies lurk under dysfunctional musical textures, primitive monotony spiked with barbed howls break open to glimpse a precious Smiths or sneering Van Halen cover. Their dizzying deformation of musical style is colossal in its playfulness, simultaneously rebellious and groveling. Barnparty: Recorded live in a barn somewhere in Ohio in 2001. ("They said it was a music festival that had something to do with Kent State University, but it just looks like your average rave to me.")
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