ODAS music project found­ed by Dean Free­man, releas­es their sec­ond EP on July 12th. Called The Film Between The Takes EP2 the four-track instru­men­tal work fol­lows EP1 which saw its release in Jan­u­ary this year. What ini­tial­ly appealed to me about West York­shire based ODAS (for­mer­ly One Day, After School) was their con­nec­tion with poet­ry – and in par­tic­u­lar with poet lau­re­ate Simon Armitage. 

The Dead Scene Poems

The Film Between The Takes EP2 is a dig­i­tal, self-released work, and is part of a big­ger project called entic­ing­ly The Dead Scene Poems – a grand-scale two or three album project due for release lat­er in 2021. 

The Dead Sea Poems is an hour-long show writ­ten and per­formed via a com­mis­sion from Wake­field Lit Fest in 2017. The project took the poet­ry col­lec­tion of the same name by Simon Armitage and re-inter­pret­ed it into a live show that com­bined orig­i­nal music and spo­ken word / vocal performances.

The major­i­ty of the music was com­posed by ODAS’s Dean Free­man with addi­tion­al pieces by Har­ry Rhodes and Dan Hayes. Spo­ken word / vocal per­for­mances were also pro­vid­ed by Ralph Dart­ford, Paul Bate­son, Simon Wid­dop, Eleanor Aldous, Andrew Whit­tak­er, Jacqui Wicks and Jayne Freeman.

The Film Between the Takes is an instru­men­tal work, begin­ning with the sound of a nee­dle placed care­ful­ly onto the record, and the gen­tle hiss crack­les in the back­ground rather com­fort­ing­ly. One Road Out has a Mog­wai feel, cin­e­mat­ic and expan­sive despite the sim­ple arrange­ment – and a feel­ing that things are being held in check, tight­ly controlled. 

Music for No One is per­haps my favourite piece: a wide-open land­scape, opti­mistic, bound­less. The track lifts itself up and out into a cli­mac­tic – and loud! – final sec­tion. The track reminds me some­what of Boards of Cana­da in the way the track is paced and structured. 

ODAS https://soundcloud.com/odas_projects
ODAS projects

LIVE SHOWS
Sept 25th at Long Divi­sion Festival

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