Omar S. Detroit

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Omar S. Detroit

Detroit’s Alex Omar Smith is a techno producer better known as Omar S, or maybe just Omar S. Detroit; maybe it’s just better to put that city’s name as the surname and subsume his last name as a middle initial. That seems to be what Detroit does to people in techno, cf. Robert Hood’s “Detroit: One Circle” etc.

Omar’s output is almost exclusively released through his own FXHE record label, which has launched the careers of other people you probably haven’t heard of such as Marcellus Pittman and Luke Hess, as well as releasing some Omar S/Shadow Ray jams under the name Oasis Collaborating. It’s all a kind of weird techno, it’s not minimal, it’s not clean or teutonic; in fact, there isn’t much that overlaps with the FXHE stuff. Some of the Oasis tracks are analogue space jams, and there is a bit of crossover with Theo Parrish soulful techno. Maybe it’s as if Omar spent a long time playing computer games and listening to Soul Music, but without muting the computer game – that’s certainly a sound evoked by Strider’s World.

Omar also produced two EPs of what he calls hip-hop under the banner “Sidetraxx”. If you care to track any of that down, you’ll find again that it defies expectation, and fits nowhere within any conventional interpretation of the term hip-hop. Here is a man working out of his own head.

I should mention that Omar runs FXHE personally, and that the label has an express commitment to producing records at a low price. Within the US EPs are $6 and LPs $11, CDs are mostly released on CD-R. Consequently, the artwork is minimal, but an instantly identifiable aesthetic of computer game screen grabs, Word-Art, and photoshop filters has followed necessarily. Much of the FXHE catalogue was recently re-pressed and is available directly from Omar in the US, and from Clone and Hardwax in Europe, among others. If you don’t buy vinyl, he has a CD out under the Fabric DJ mix series, where in a characteristically single-minded move, he used only his own songs. That CD is a good showcase including “The Maker” a bizarre vocal jam about God, and “Day”, a meditation on what sonic loops can do to your mind and body.

Another recent Omar tidbit is his input in remastering the “Red Lightbulb Theory” by Leron Carson for Theo Parrish’s Sound Signature label, which was produced in 1987 when Leron was 15 years old. The ultra low-fi proto-acid hypno jams there contained are carried along on a stream of ferric tape distortion and bass frequencies pushed into the red. Listening to something like “Red Lightbulb…” it is possible to situate Omar S not among a lineage of style, but rather as one of a few disconnected points in musical history, people producing electronic codes for deciphering. He DJs at London’s East Village club on Saturday, October 17.
This entry was written by Jack Brennan, posted on October 15, 2009 at 7:57 pm, filed under Music and tagged FXHE, Luke Hess, Marcellus Pittman, Oasis Collaborating, Omar S. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.