Review: Oishi – once upon a time there was a mountain

The debut record by Oishi has all the playfulness of two people meeting eachother in a doorway and trying to squeeze past. A couple of false starts as both attempt the same diagonal. They laugh, shimmy sideways, and then half-dance as they finally both make it through. There are two A-sides here, with Zheng Hao and Ren Shang taking laptop and cassette player respectively on one piece, then swapping sound sources for the other. Wry contrasts abound, as do uncanny kinships – Oishi seem just as interested in making sounds repel as they are in having them align. They jostle between concurrence and dispute, all elbows and smiles, digital field recording barging into meddled tape, the sounds of the everyday finding miraculous footholds in out-there electronics.

Key to all this is the way the record is mixed. Hard panning works to tuck certain sounds in the darkened stereo nooks, and the two players regularly toy with this idea that they're unwitting cohabitants rather than active collaborators. On one side, Hao's field recording of a dogwalk (lo-fi birdsong and Illinois breezes) stops and starts beneath a drizzle of tape noise that seeps in from the edges. On the flip, Shang flits between extracts of various cassettes – country music, easy listening – which emanate in tinny frequencies to the left and right, while Hao emulates an erratically-revving motorcycle engine at the centre. Both machines are acting up, spools and gears akimbo, with the romantic potential of an evening bike ride sabotaged by a weathered mixtape and overdue vehicle service. Instead of a linear-time-flow-state, everything is sputtering and disregulated. "If a mountain has two sides," explains Hao, "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". So who's who and where's what? Does it even matter?