Professionally duplicated, cassette edition of Oishi's 'once upon a time there was a mountain'. Included full colour printed j-card and a bright yellow cassette, with a business card-sized insert.
Includes unlimited streaming of once upon a time there was a mountain
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On their debut album, 'once upon a time there was a mountain', Oishi use warped tape loops, field recordings and digital manipulation to explore how everyday sounds can carry unexpected paths of expression and meaning. Evoking fictional vocabularies and car radios via motorbike rides down imagined mountains.
Zheng Hao and Ren Shang are two artists from China, currently-based in London, UK. Their music as Oishi is a playful, joyful, and at points absurdist exploration through musique concrete, diaristic field recordings and digitally augmented realities.
once upon a time there was a mountain documents several facets of Oishi’s shifting interactions. For the a-side, Hao plays laptop, while Shang is on cassette player, the duo switching roles on the b-side. The raw material of the a-side is a field recording of Hao walking a friend’s dog in Urbana, Illinois. Effects both analogue (changing the speed of the tape) and digital are applied to shift a potentially familiar sound world into something concretely unfamiliar. The b-side poetically simulates the sound of a motorcycle engine, and is also inspired by the instability of car radio. Illuminating the collision between frenzied activity and apparent serenity involved in a vehicle’s movement, it also toys with the affect these sounds can carry, and how it can be captured or altered.
The duo explain that the album is partly driven by a desire to explore what an ‘Oishi-style’ blues would be. Hao: “the idea is for us to be the neighbours that live in the mountain - or farmer - people that would use their own original language to express their feelings, less compositional concepts, more direct, romantic expressions. therefore, using the word blues could probably be the simplest way for the audience to understand the feeling, and oishi-style means we are trying to deliver the bluesy feeling for you in our own musical way.”
Hinting at how the tape could be experienced, and the fact both sides are simply title ‘a side’, Hao explains: “If a mountain has two sides, then either side of the mountain can be the front, the back, or ‘one of the sides’ – a side. Therefore the mountain’s sound can be heard going up, but also going down.”
Oishi bio:
Both studying in the UK, Oishi met at a noise event in 2021, and started collaborating soon after. The project’s moniker is taken from a portmanteau of their names. “It came from the combination of our name ‘shanghaojia’ which is the name of a popular snack brand, the english name is oishi so we applied that too,” explains Hao.
Since then, they’ve become part of London’s nebulous, hard to categorize DIY scene. A community that bridges the gap between jazz-influenced improvisation, computer generated sound, and acoustic-electro-acoustic music. Concerts at venues such as Hundred Years Gallery, Spanners and Café Oto have seen Oishi fulfil their mantra of “slightly different, or very different every time”.
Performances have seen them use cassette players as percussion instruments or present live remixes of their support acts’ sets. Elsewhere they’ve contrasted sound poetry-like vocalisations against hijacked drum machines and samplers. Live and on-record, they take an inquisitive approach, treating the audible as a tactile material loaded with hackable sentimental and historical resonance. Sounds and their sources are objects to be twisted, teased and morphed. The resulting sonic world is adjacent to the works of Beatriz Ferreyra, the tape splice detournements of Aaron Dilloway, and the playful physicality of Henri Chopin. Oishi’s process is in constant flight, driven by a playful sense of subversion which sees familiar tropes of experimental music bent into something distinctly their own.
They’ve released several recordings digitally through their Bandcamp, beginning with their debut At Home With Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – Raw Mix. As with their live practice, these releases have seen the duo wield digital and analogue processes to pry at the possibilities hidden in recorded sound, an ongoing curiosity which manifests once more on once upon a time there was a mountain.
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