Ab Initio by Obedient Hollowness

10th album by Obedient Hollowness

"With Ab Initio, the tenth full-length under his OBEDIENT HOLLOWNESS moniker, Shird Leopart dives headfirst into a different cauldron — this time trading the lava flows of ambient improvisation for the jagged edges of post-punk, post-rock, and musique concrète. The result is a raw, feverish document that feels equal parts ritual, collage, and exorcism.

Leopart plays everything here — drums, guitar, bass, analog synth — and even handles the cut-up vocal samples, slicing political speeches, film dialogue, and found sounds into an unsettling mosaic. The mix is claustrophobic but deliberate: drums sound like they were recorded in a concrete stairwell, bass throbs with a dub-like menace, guitars alternate between jagged shards and chiming dissonance.

Musically, Ab Initio lives somewhere between CAN’s locked-in trance grooves, Modra’s noise-scorched meditations, and the nihilistic dirge of Brainbombs — but it’s more fractured, more unstable, as if every track is seconds away from collapse. There’s a physicality to it: the drums don’t just keep time, they seem to wrestle with it.

The speech cut-ups are key to the album’s unsettling mood — at times they function like percussion, other times like ghosts trapped in the mix, hinting at unseen narratives. The overall effect is both hypnotic and unnerving, a soundtrack for wandering through a ruined city at dawn.

Once again, Leopart not only plays and records everything but also handles the mix and creates the cover art — the visual counterpart to the music’s fractured intensity. Ab Initio feels like a total work, one where sound, structure, and imagery all point to the same raw, unsettling place.

For fans of: CAN, Modra, Brainbombs, early Swans, Nurse With Wound."

> Oblique Sounds, 2025

Tracklist

1.	Disco Sucks !	5:01

2.	The Deal	5:16

3.	Just Obsession	4:19

4.	Last Night	9:27

5.	Human Face	3:31

6.	Maverick John	4:55

7.	Earth Back	5:07

8.	Beverly Kills	6:09

9.	Shame House	4:01

10.	Fake Glory	4:19

Credits

released September 19, 2025

Composed, engineered & produced by Shird Leopart

Performing : Audition 60's guitar, Behringer SF-300, Egmond B-2 & Fender Precision basses, Sonicware Liven Texture Lab, sounds, speech cut-up, Sunlite drum kit, Syntrillium CEP 2.1

Recorded, edited & mastered at Q-Scared & SSR
From June, 28th to July, 16th 2025
Play it deep, wide & all alone

Photos + design = Shird

© Self-Sufficient Records 2025

www.youtube.com/channel/UCaAQvvDXd0Oexr726rCRi_Q

ssr-417

License