Osmium - OSMIUM

OSMIUM is a collaboration between Oscar-winning Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, James Ginzburg (emptyset, Subtext), Rully Shabara (Senyawa), and Grammy-winning producer and sound designer Sam Slater.

Forging burnished electroacoustic soundscapes with metallic drones, barbed rhythms, and bio-mechanical vocalizations, OSMIUM’s debut album resists any fixed vision of the future. Instead, it channels a viscous, unorthodox flow of sonic speculation—smoldering through echoes of ancient pasts while blazing toward a volatile frontier of fate.

Driven by questions around the relationship between humans and machines, tradition and progress, individual and collective expression, OSMIUM channel their deep expertise into a set of forward-thinking sonic interrogations. The music draws from folk, doom metal, 20th-century minimalism, industrial, and extreme noise, yet never settles fully into any genre.

While each member brings along a laundry list of accolades, the project is far greater than the sum of its parts. Widely known for her aforementioned soundtrack work and run of acclaimed solo albums on Touch, Guðnadóttir plays the halldorophone, a unique cello-like electroacoustic instrument designed by Halldór Úlfarsson that allows the performer to harness unstable feedback loops.

Taking his cues from this process, Sam Slater - who's worked alongside Jóhann Jóhannsson, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Ben Frost and others - generates rhythms using a self-oscillating drum he custom designed with KOMA Elektronik, and Ginzburg – one half of emptyset and curator of Subtext Recordings - responds in kind, producing booming tambura-like sonorities from a device he developed himself based on the monocord, an ancient single-stringed resonator.

OSMIUM synchronize the three unique instruments using a custom system of robotics to generate basic rhythms that underpin their improvisations and experiments, and although Shabara just uses his voice, it's his alien tones that supply the band with their conceptual fulcrum. The vocalist is one of South Asia's most recognizable underground artists, and the sounds he's able to create using exhaustively rehearsed extended techniques are so distinctive that he's been studied by scientists back home in Indonesia. As part of OSMIUM, Shabara attempts to merge with the band's machines, warping his vocal cords to mimic the robotics and originate hoarse percussive cracks and eldritch tonalities.

At the center of this volatile assemblage is Rully Shabara, whose voice forms the band’s conceptual and emotional fulcrum. One of Southeast Asia’s most singular underground artists, Shabara employs exhaustively rehearsed extended vocal techniques—so unique they’ve even drawn scientific attention in Indonesia. Within OSMIUM, his vocalizations merge with machines, producing hoarse percussive cracks and eldritch vocal tones that blur the line between human and mechanical expression.