Hot on the heels of their late-2020 album Protean Threat, the ever-prolific Osees released a companion album of sorts made up of drastically remixed tracks, found sounds, manipulated field recordings, and general weirdness under the name Panther Rotate. On it, the band's John Dwyer works the mixing board dials like a phased King Tubby as he twists existing songs into knots, makes a motorik hash out of a cover of the song "Don't Blow Your Mind" by Alice Cooper's teenage garage band the Spiders, whips up clouds of staticky noise, and generally creates something new and exciting out of what sounds like the guts of Protean Threat turned inside out and left in the sun to bake. The results aren't as powerfully exciting as a "real" Osees album, but it's still fascinating to hear Dwyer indulge in this kind of experimental tomfoolery. Mixed in among the formless jams and shards of electronic noise, some songs peek their heads out in new form. For example, the paint-melting "Scramble Suit II," which kicked off Protean with a breathless rush, is reshaped into a hypnotic Can-like dirge that's off-center enough that one might need to check their vinyl for warps. "If I Had an Experiment" turns "If I Had My Way" into a muffled, dubbed mumble that saps all the forward motion of the original and sends it spinning dazedly into an infinite doughnut, "Terminal Experiment" takes one of the album's fiercest tracks, "Terminal Jape," and gives it an electric Miles-on-Pluto remix that creeps instead of stomps, and the aforementioned cover of the Spiders track removes all the garage rock grit of the original and replaces it with locked-groove psychedelic jazz. These blown-out and totally torn-apart remixes and remodels are linked by short bursts of noise, poetry, and space, the result being something that feels like art but isn't stuffy or at all pretentious. It seems likely that Dwyer knocked this all out in one sitting, or at least over a weekend, which gives the record an almost electric feeling of immediacy. It certainly doesn't rock as hard as an Osees album, but the mind-blowing nature of Dwyer's work remains intact and there's absolutely no reason anyone already under the band's spell shouldn't find Panther Rotate to be another vital and inspiring piece of the Oh Sees/Osees puzzle.
© Tim Sendra /TiVo