Oskar LP2

A while back, Nick Powell of OSKAR was in Spain working on a production of the notorious "play within a play" 'Marat Sade'. Because the plot concerns the Marquis de Sade trying to stage a drama within an insane asylum, Nick decided to hold some workshops with patients of the Dr Izquerdo Clinic. This psychiatric institution in Madrid is home to many people forgotten by society, often chronic schizophrenics who are heavily medicated. Nick recalls meeting the inmates who have very little in the way of communication with each other or anyone else: "One day, when I was recording the workshop, a group of previously uncommunicative patients in their 60s and 70s started singing songs from their childhoods, and, maybe even more amazingly, applauding each other when they had sung. According to the staff this was absolutely unprecedented. It seemed like a good idea to make an OSKAR track around the recording of that moment."

This story illuminates OSKAR, a band based around ex-Strangelove member Nick and former Death By Milkfloat/Collapsed Lung mainstay, Jonny Dawe. The song in question, 'Sanitorio' is like the haunted tones of an organic Boards of Canada being taken on a bucolic stroll by the Penguin Café Orchestra, joined by voices from another time and place. Put simply it finds beauty where most would find horror, sadness or angst. This is helped in no uncertain terms by the "notional third member", cellist and occasional vocalist Sarah Wilson (whose previous collaborations include Belle and Sebastian and Tindersticks).

Their second album adds more weight, more vivid colour, more beauty to the velvety melancholia of their 2004 debut 'Air Conditioning'. As Jonny puts it: "The debut worked more as an undulating drift; it carried a melancholy from start to finish. The shape of 'LP:2' has a variety of contrasts. It is still a journey in form but it has more hills and valleys, different terrain and a stranger climate - a bit like New Zealand."

Their interest in unusual beauty is reflected in the magnetism of the track 'Reichenbach Falls' which puts a 'nonsense' Dadaist phonetic poem by Hugo Ball to the kind of minimalist refrain that calls to mind Steve Reich or Michael Nyman.

Elsewhere they have taken their experiences from sound tracking films, art exhibitions, catwalks, sound installations and transposed it to a unique musical at the confluence of the pop and the avant. Theres is a world that takes in freak folk and baroque strings ('Printer Tzara'), cabaret performance, spoken word and art rock ('Some Song') and brittle yet warm-hearted pop, dub-infused electronica and epic post rock ('Hi Beam Blue'). Speaking about the austere beauty of 'Hi Beam Blue' Nick Concludes: "I love the twists the music takes on its way. We wrote the lyrics together. They are just a set of images that are about being really alive, but they are also about death at the same time. Which is I guess how you'd feel looking through the windscreen just before the car hits the brick wall."

Welcome then to the world of OSKAR.