Opin - Opin [Vinyl]

Opin began life in tumult at the end of an engagement and an abrupt relocation. After a month spent traveling between couches, Landis Wine set up a small recording interface on the bed in the room he was renting that spring. He began to work on songs that were markedly different from those in his band White Laces, songs conceived without consideration of traditional parts and built piece by piece from disparate synths, samples, short instrumental loops and bits of found sound from his environment. This approach also yielded a lyrical frankness that Wine had never attempted before. As the songs developed, more varied instrumentation entered the picture. Wine began to add recordings of musicians from around Richmond, Virginia: David Hood of No BS Brass Band on saxophone, Lindsey Spurrier of local garage punks Hot Dolphin on backing vocals, Dash Lewis of Gardener on modular synthesizer, Hannah Standiford of the gamelan ensemble Rumput and finally, Tori Hovater from White Laces contributing vocals and piano, who quickly became a co-conspirator in the project. Pieces of recordings were made around the city over the ensuing year, ranging from the group’s practice space in an old garage door factory (RIP Garbers) to the basement of the Richmond Ballet. Tori and Landis decamped to Philly to track drums with Chris Ward (Pattern is Movement/St. Vincent) and piece the album together with producer Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, Nothing, War on Drugs) at Uniform Recording. What they left with is a record that breathes outside many of the trappings of style and genre. It's an instrumental hall of mirrors built from excellent musicians, many of whom have never met, playing together virtually over the course of many months. Short snippets of degraded sound push against live musicians, direct vocals and melodic mirages, never standing quite still enough to give away its secrets. It is an album of movement, displacement, anxiety and diving deep without restraint.