Oppenheimer MKII’s Oh! My Mind Is a Storm is paranoia rendered as pop machinery: compact, severe, oddly catchy, and built around the sense that the private mind has become a public emergency. The duo of Andy Oppenheimer, on lyrics and vocals, and Mahk Rumbae, on arrangements and production, work inside a strain of icy synth-pop that has always understood dread as a useful dance partner. Here, that dread is internalized, digitized, and sent back through the screen as a command.
Mahk Rumbae’s production tightens around it with crunchy drums, rippling minimal synths, and ghostly pads that recall an eighties science-fiction serial caught between public-access television and a government transmission. Andy Oppenheimer’s soft-clipped delivery lands like a machine reciting beat poetry after reading too many classified reports.
That sense of psychic pressure is the point. Oh! My Mind Is a Storm drives panic into club form, with Andy Oppenheimer declaring, ‘When I go dark, I’m into demon mode’. The line is funny, faintly ridiculous, and unnervingly current, catching the way contemporary anxiety often borrows the language of online performance. Demon mode becomes a state of overload, a persona, a coping mechanism, a threat.
The accompanying video is deliberately austere: Andy Oppenheimer faces the camera, his head floating in greyscale, the image warped and reduced until he appears less like a performer than a transmission that has survived from some late-twentieth-century broadcast bunker. There is a touch of Max Headroom in the presentation, though drained of commercial smirk and turned into something more spectral: a pair of cathode-tube ghosts, bending time while barely moving at all. The minimalism suits the song. Nothing distracts from the faces, the voices, or the sense of a mind caught in feedback with itself.
Watch below:
The track also sharpens the broader concerns of Embrace The Dark, the long-awaited second album from Oppenheimer MKII, due June 30th via Wave Tension Records. Embrace The Dark does exactly as its title suggests: it welcomes dark, apocalyptic themes for our current turbulent times. In nine mind-blowing tracks, Mahk’s thunderous dance rhythms and addictive synth-pop melodies combine with Andy’s latest dystopian (and sometimes utopian) visions of our past, present and future.
Andy Oppenheimer, formerly one-half of the cult 1980s synth-pop duo Oppenheimer Analysis, brings the clipped authority of the early minimal-synth era, while Mahk Rumbae, known for Codex Empire, Mitra Mitra, and Konstruktivists, gives the material a harder frame. Since their 2013 debut, The Presence of the Abnormal, Oppenheimer MKII have issued singles through Falco Invernale Records, Peripheral Minimal, and TONN Recordings. With “Oh! My Mind Is a Storm,” Oppenheimer MKII turns mental overload into a stark little broadcast from the edge of the future.
Listen to Oh! My Mind Is a Storm below and order the album here.
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