Mark Harwood’s "or, Urim" is one of those records that doesn’t knock politely. It kicks the door, apologises halfway through, then steals your coat on the way out - and somehow you thank it for the experience. Released on his own Penultimate Press, the album continues Harwood’s long-standing obsession with fractured authorship, cultural debris, and the uneasy romance between human memory and machine logic.
Harwood, born in the early ’70s, belongs to that awkward in-between generation: old enough to remember when sound was scarce, physical, and stubbornly slow; young enough to witness its collapse into infinite, frictionless data. "or, Urim" lives exactly in that crack. It’s plunderphonic in spirit but not nostalgic, gleefully irresponsible yet oddly reflective - like rifling through an abandoned archive while wondering who will own the ruins.
Musically, the album behaves like a hallucination with a filing system. Psychedelia rubs shoulders with progressive electronics, avant-classical gestures appear and vanish, and extreme digital abrasion keeps reminding you that comfort is not on the menu. Harwood doesn’t collage for shock value alone; he rearranges pre-existing forms until they start asking uncomfortable questions about authorship, ownership, and power. This is less “sampling culture” and more “sampling as civil disobedience”.
Tracks stretch and compress time in unpredictable ways. "Tarshish" unfolds like a slow, ceremonial data breach, while "Treuer Atem" breathes with an uncanny, half-organic pulse - intimate, then suddenly alien. On the flip side, "The Hunt (Pathetic Study)" feels deliberately awkward, as if testing how much absurdity a structure can tolerate before collapsing. And the closing "Hesychasm or Urim and Thummim" is a long, murmuring descent: part ritual, part corrupted firmware update, hovering between meditation and menace.
There’s humour here, but it’s dry, sideways, and occasionally cruel - the kind that laughs not because things are funny, but because the alternative is screaming. Harwood seems acutely aware of the irony of living in an era where a child can be punished for recontextualising a few seconds of sound, while vast systems ingest entire cultural histories without blinking. "or, Urim" doesn’t resolve this contradiction; it sharpens it, presses it to the ear, and listens for feedback.
In the end, this is not a comforting record, nor does it pretend to be. It’s dusty and futuristic at once, a head trip that acknowledges both the thrill and the dread of our synthetic present. "or, Urim" delights in theft, yes - but also in the fragile hope that meaning can still leak through the cracks. A record for those who enjoy their electronics unstable, their philosophy unresolved, and their questions left deliciously unanswered.