BLOG 22/01/2019
The Jan Diaries — A Few Words on Davor O and ‘A Nice Machine’
In January 2019 The Jan Diaries turned into a review — and a personal one. Davor O, in full Davor Ostojić, is a Zagreb electronic producer Jan Kinčl has known since secondary school, and A Nice Machine is his first album in more than a decade. The column doubles as a short history of one corner of Zagreb’s scene.
What the piece covers
The backstory runs through Sergej Lugović — today a lecturer and the founder of the club Sirup — whose Home Made Electronica label, started in 2003, released Davor’s debut Sozial Freischwebende in 2005. Before that came the Red Bull Music Academy in Rome, where Davor worked in the studio with Mark Pritchard of Global Communication; the track that came out of those sessions, Where It Begins, opens the debut. Kinčl walks through the rest of the catalogue: New Tendencies (2007), six tracks over fifty minutes with a remix by Finnish producer Juha Kahlanen, which he considers Davor’s underappreciated magnum opus, and Slobodnolebdeća glazba (2008) on Davor’s own Freefloating Music — earlier material re-sequenced, in a hundred hand-painted CD copies.
A Nice Machine brings eleven tracks, several from earlier singles: Zagrli Sunce, Tiha Razina and Slikam Mirno from the 2017 EP Rasulo on the American label Kimochi, Transitional Objects from a single on Detroit’s Matrix, Mountain Wind from a Home Made Electronica single, plus six previously unreleased pieces — some of which Kinčl first heard as works in progress, played on his own radio show.
In the review
The verdict: darker and heavier than the debut, more stripped-down and raw, layered with noise, drones and sounds that resist identification — some twenty minutes of it crossing ambient electronics, experiments with distorted guitar and drum machines, minimal techno and hypnotic downtempo. Kinčl calls it, in his own words, “vrlo heady album, u nedostatku bolje riječi” — a very heady album, for want of a better word — and recommends taking its seventy-plus minutes in one sitting, through good headphones.
Read the full piece
The full review, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Six minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Par riječi o Davoru i novom albumu 'A Nice Machine' → redbull.com