Last August, Craig Klein, who records music under the name Ohr and formerly fronted The Race, was deep into the recording of his new album, Afterglow, when his father got sick and died unexpectedly. It all happened in the span of a month, and Klein found himself reeling. “It rocked my world,” the songwriter recalls. “All I could really do to keep from losing it was to just work on music.”
In a haze of anxiety and grief, Klein returned to his music and found that the record’s themes resonated eerily well with his new reality. He had already intended Afterglow to be a loose song cycle exploring themes of daybreak and sunset: What does it mean to find light in the darkness? When darkness comes on, is the sun simply going up somewhere else? In college, Klein met drummer Kevin Duneman, and they formed the acclaimed Chicago band The Race, whose jagged and inventive records blurred the lines between post-punk, electronica, and moody goth rock. A subsequent move to Seattle left him feeling isolated and cut off from the music world. He gradually redeveloped the songwriting bug after buying a cheap electric piano. Klein began gathering once a week to work on music with friends. He fell back in love with the psych-rock heroes of his youth. He channeled these heady sounds into a new solo project, Ohr, named after both a Hebrew word for light and the German electronic label associated with Tangerine Dream. In a flood of inspiration, Klein recorded seventeen songs and emerged with Ohr’s debut album, Walk in the Light, in 2021.
Klein leaves no sonic stone unturned in the haze of psychedelia that is “Red Pill.” The single pulls from different eras and genres to land on this all-encompassing approach to electro-rock fusion. The dense pulsating arrangement evokes the spirit of the early new wave scene while the lush vocals lean more to the shoegaze side, creating intriguing textures and never allowing one element to step on the next. If anything, “Red Pill” is a mastery of song structure. The trance-inducing nature of the song stems from the waves of up-tempo drums that crash land just after moments of guitar-driven ambiance and sweeping harmonies. Miraculously, this doesn’t sound like a bunch of ideas loosely thrown together. Instead, Klein created an expansive playing field for his lofty ideas to roam and grow freely, creating the warm and welcoming environment of the track. On the surface, “Red Pill” should be a more challenging listen and complex composition. Klein can sew the fabrics of different genres together so tightly that it launches him into a stratosphere of wonky melodies and infectious drum patterns.
“I constructed Red Pill and the whole Afterglow LP through a process of recording all of my ideas in my studio, sampling the best bits into an Elektron Octatrack, and then creating a remix, which I used as the basis to finish the song,” explains Klein. “Sampling the sounds gave them a different sonic character than the original takes and also let me cut them up and freely move pieces around to try out different combinations. Sonically, the track combines a lot of disparate elements: synth and electric bass, ring modded and fuzz guitars, live drums combined with drum machines, an old Ace Tone organ, and clean and heavily processed vocoded vocals which play off of each other. I drew inspiration from a lot of different sources; highest on the list would be remixes from the Creation, Factory Records early 90s era, Connected by the Stereo MCs, the guitar sound on Achtung Baby, the groove of a track called “Forever’s No Time At All” from the first Pete Townshend solo record, some of the dreamy passages of early Mercury Rev, My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized and Spacemen 3.”
