Whenever traveling to another country I make a point of picking out a handful of record stores to visit. While I always keep my eyes open for rarities, my primary focus is on bringing home a selection of local artists who I’ve never heard of before. We produce so much music here in the US that it’s way harder for musicians from other countries to break into our market than it is for US artists to break in theirs, and US listeners are notoriously averse to non-English lyrics, so there’s a lot of amazing stuff that never sees the light of day here.
Our recent trip to Austria was no exception. The first shop we hit up was Rave Up Records, which had a nice section of Austrian artists, but that’s not where I came across Black Peppermint, finding it instead in the electronic section. Which…. kinda fits… but kinda doesn’t.
Original-Low-Fi (O.L.F.) consists of MC O.L.F. and MC Frenchtongue, and given that they’re both MCs that definitely lets you know there’s some hip hop involved. But… they’re not straight hip hop, not by any stretch of the imagination. I couldn’t find much about this project online, but I have seen them tagged as noise, abstract, and even electroclash. And I get it – Black Peppermint is a hard album to fit into a nice, neat genre box. Abstract is probably the closest. O.L.F. treat us to a sound collage over which they speak. It’s hard to think of it as a rap, at least not all the time – there are some rhymes, but the cadence is all over the place, often aggressively so, and the edgy abrasiveness takes away any sense of flow. Lest you think this is a criticism, it most definitely is not. O.L.F. are out here trying to do something very specific. There’s a vision, and they’re executing it. It’s the kind of music that takes your brain outside of the patterns it knows and is comfortable with, forcing you to consider alternate perspectives, which you can either lean into or reject. The choice is yours. O.L.F. followed up Black Peppermint with another double album, 2011s Mad Men Butterfly, which I will be trying to buy if I can find a copy for sale with a shipping price that won’t break the bank.
MC O.L.F., aka Franz Dude, has made a name for himself in recent years as a cinematographer, perhaps most notably for his work on the Austrian film My Blind Heart (2014), which saw him win the Award for Best Cinematography at the Brooklyn Film Festival and a nomination for a Golden Frog at the Camerimage Film Festival. He’s also a painter and sculptor, and appears to more recently be involved in a shop specializing in kitsch items. MC Frenchtongue, aka Olivier Hölzl, is also an artist, and he credits the O.L.F. project and working with Dude as having a huge impact on his life:
“OLF is the basis of my creative work. The encounter with Franz Dude has changed my life permanently. While working on the albums with him I learned camera work, film music, post-production and much more. From the beginning, OLF was a multi sensory project of visual, video, voice, performance, music and experimentation. Many artists follow patterns of success, proven to be pleasing the the audience, thus submit to institutional constraints. Experimentation lacks! Original Low Fi is neither pleasing nor does it follow any trend.“
As near as I can tell Black Peppermint isn’t available on Bandcamp or Spotify or almost anywhere else for that matter. Except, thankfully, YouTube!, where someone has gifted us with the entire album. So if O.L.F. sounds rad to you, or even interesting, you can give Black Peppermint a listen.