EBN-OZN - “AEIOU (SOMETIMES Y)”
A somewhat forgotten, but endlessly fascinating slice of New Wave quirk. Where to even begin with this one?
“AEIOU” plainly tells us a story and pontificates on the wider significance of said story in alternating strokes. On one hand there is the droll, spoken narrative of a character who falls in love with a beautiful, but enchanting foreigner, despite their lack of a shared linguistic background, only to fall prey to apparent miscommunication as a result of this...though the two of them get a happy ending, or so it seems. The stilted vocoder that chants the chorus, whose significance is initially rather unclear, is later justified by another passage, in a similar style but a very different tone than our main narrator. “It’s amazing we communicate at all,” it says, given the vast number of different languages and dialects that exist...but at least they do have one thing in common: the use of the titular vowels! Of course that isn’t really true, if you know anything about linguistics, but the real point is that we have fundamental commonalities that transcend all of that, if we know where to look. What’s perhaps a more compelling argument for this point than that, though, are what immediately follows this declaration: an infectious tribal drum breakdown, followed by a totally wordless scream! Certainly these represent universal languages, no?
The LP this track appeared on, Feeling Cavalier, proved to be the only release of Ebn-Ozn, with both of their members going their separate ways shortly after and pursuing different careers. But they’ll always have the distinction of having created the first album and single recorded entirely with a computer, in this case, the famed Fairlight CMI.
