2

OCS is a side project for John Dwyer, leader/founder of the San Francisco-based Coachwhips — and like a lot of side projects, OCS doesn’t sound anything like the artist’s primary gig. The Coachwhips favor a noisy, distorted, raw, primal and hard-rocking blend of alternative rock, punk and garage rock; they aren’t very musical, but despite their limitations, Dwyer’s Coachwhips are exhilarating and undeniably infectious. OCS, on the other hand, is a lot more reserved and nuanced; 2 is perhaps best described as an experimental, oddly appealing mixture of folk-rock and avant-garde noise rock. On these recordings — which were made over a two-year period from 2001-2003 — Dwyer plays a calm, reflective, even pastoral acoustic guitar that interacts with bizarre collages of dissonant electro-noise. It’s almost as if he united the picker school of acoustic folk-rock guitar playing — that is, musicians like John Fahey, Leo Kottke, Peter Lang and Stefan Grossman — with the noisemakers of rock’s avant-garde (although 2 has its share of vocals and isn’t strictly an instrumental album). People in the jazz world like to describe this type of approach as “inside/outside” — in other words, contrasting something that is conventional with something that is left of center. 2 isn’t jazz, although it demonstrates that inside/outside contrasts can also work well if a musician has folk and rock on his mind. Dwyer’s experimentation doesn’t always pay off on this eccentric album; occasionally, he stumbles and drops the ball. But more often than not, the things that he tries are successful — and overall, the folk-rock acoustic guitar and the dissonant electro-noise have an odd way of complementing one another. This enjoyably intriguing, if slightly uneven, release makes one hope that Dwyer will have more OCS projects outside of Coachwhips. – Alex Henderson