Edge Effects, by Josh Ottum

Edge Effects

by Josh Ottum

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Foil stamped and numbered pressing of 500.

Includes unlimited streaming of Edge Effects via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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edition of 500

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1.	Ice Plant and Pools 02:41	buy track
2.	Depress Descend 02:52	buy track
3.	Erase the Bar 03:52	buy track
4.	Sit in Silence 03:38	buy track
5.	Normal Romantic 04:56	buy track
6.	After School Special 02:39	buy track
7.	Lung X-ray 03:53	buy track
8.	So Good 01:52	buy track
9.	Now or Never 03:44	buy track
10.	Catch On 06:11	buy track
11.	Edge Effects 04:50	buy track

about

Ottum wasn’t sure he’d even end up finishing another album. It’d been about ten years since he’d tried, during which he made the domestic-maturational rounds: Grad school, home ownership, professorship, parenting. “Along with that comes a lot of existential crisis stuff,” he says. “Who am I? I hope I can keep making music, but I’m afraid I can’t. You know, that type of fear.”

You know—who doesn’t? But behind every crisis is the need for expedient solutions and the release of ego that sometimes follows: Call it the edge effect at Thinking and Doing. Ottum and his band made the album in five days: two for basic tracking, one for overdubs, two for vocals and detail work—no preening, no vanity, no dicking around. What if you took the palliative sterility of ‘80s soft-rock and smeared the lens? What if you asked the prom band to play vaporwave? Can you squeeze jazz from a children’s synthesizer, or meaning from a battery-powered amplifier? Edge Effects.

The first time I heard it, I kept thinking about the marine layer north of San Diego, where my wife’s parents live: how gray and dense it seems in the morning, but how easily—and invariably—it burns off by lunch. As a citizen of the desert (a place of hard light and decisive angles), I find fog seductive but untrustworthy: How is something shapeless actually there?

Wouldn’t you know that Ottum grew up in North County, playing trippy instrumentals with friends over an ocean view: Pat Metheny without the jazz, Windham Hill for kids who come home with sand in their shoes. Edge Effects is marine-layer music: sparkling, eerie, postcard perfect, a little sad. Like the fog, it telegraphs its impermanence—it burns off. Out of the mist, decisions are made: “Grab your friend by the throat and tell him that you love him,” Ottum sings on “Catch On.” But most of the time, we stay on the threshold: Neither turf or grass, past or present, burb or brush. They’d build here if they could. - Mike Powell, Tucson, Arizona

credits

released May 12, 2023

Josh Ottum - electric and acoustic guitars, SynthPlus 60, vocals
Davin Givhan - electric bass & guitar
James McAlister - drums, percussion
John Clement Wood - SynthPlus 60, Yamaha Grand Piano

with
Rosie Thomas - backing vocals on "So Good"

Produced by Chris Schlarb
at BIG EGO, Long Beach, CA.

Mixed by Chris Schlarb and Josh Ottum

Engineered by Devin O'Brien

Recorded January 10th - 14th, 2022

Mastered by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters, Los Angeles, CA.

Cover photography by Josh Ottum
Back cover photography by Devin O'Brien and Chris Schlarb
Layout by David J. Woodruff

All songs written by Josh Ottum
Published by Bernasconi Music (BMI)

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about

Josh Ottum California

Josh Ottum is a musician in California.

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