Following last month's excellent "Baby Has a Frown," Ouri is back with another new track. For her second single of 2024, she's recruited fellow Montrealer Jonah Yano on "Quiet Drumming."
Hiroshima-born Yano released his sophomore album, portraits of a dog, last year, which landed on Exclaim!'s Best Albums of 2023 list. Ouri, meanwhile, released BT002: Self Hypnosis Tape in 2022 following her lauded 2021 debut, Frame of a Fauna.
"When I had an afternoon with Jonah in my studio last summer, I knew that the music we made couldn't feel like fiction, it had to feel like a documentary of that moment," Ouri explained in a statement. "We naturally went for an epic longing, his beautiful folk touch and my explosive production met in the middle."
A little over halfway through "Quiet Drumming," the sound of a cricket chirping intersects with an electronic breakdown; it's a moment that crystallizes the song's evaporation of markers of genre — even the concept itself — into the soft blue light of oblivion. Yano and Ouri are a symbiotic pair, finding the grandeur in subtlety (and vice versa) and emphasizing the resonance of the former's voice with the latter's feathery, glitched-out lilt.
Give it a listen below.