Del Osei-Owusu sits down with artists on the FOTN Radar, with a cup of tea and biscuits and gets them to tell their origin story. This week it’s The Infinity Chamber, and he brought some kiwi crisps, made from real chocolate.
Hello Dylan how are you?
Hi Del, I’m drinking, fighting, thinking, fucking, writing, and skipping my merry way through the senseless chaos, idiocy, and death of life.
Thank heavens we have music!
You’re an artist from New Zealand now living in Istanbul how did it all begin for you?
After studying (philosophy) in New Zealand, I decided to put practice to the theory, and hit the road with a guitar and little else. Some years later I found myself on the South Coast of Turkey, swimming, playing and singing out the long, sweltering nights, and living for free. I used to come into Istanbul during the winters. In those days it was cheap, and wild, and there were electricity cuts more or less daily, and I remember sitting in a small, below ground-level bar at a solid wooden table beside an open fireplace, writing in my journal, with a large tankard of beer and a candle beside me for light, somewhere within an ancient pre-medieval city, as snow blew heavy, and legs ambled past the window, and thinking “Yes, I’m in the right place!”
What did you listen to growing up?
My father was a rock radio DJ in the days radio was king, interviewing the likes of Chuck Berry and so on, and I was basically raised on rock music. For me the visage of David Gilmore on the cover of Ummagumma, or of Black Sabbath standing in line on the cover of Sabotage seem as naturally familiar to me as my own face reflected in a mirror. When each of the kids in our family were born, my father would gift my mother an LP. Back at home I have my birth record, Led Zeppelin III, with “To my darling wife, on the occasion of the birth of our first son, Dylan xxx” inscribed on the gatefold. Speaking of which, when Led Zeppelin’s tour reached New Zealand, my parents had a terrible decision to make: New baby… but Zeppelin! But, new baby, but Led Zeppelin! Suffice to say, the first live concert I attended (from a friend’s house beside the stadium) at 21 days old, must have been a good one – I barely remember any of it!
Your origin story is quite unique having travelled the world with a sheepskin coat and a guitar, which place had the most profound effect on you?
I’ve loved everywhere I’ve lived. I tend to travel slowly, I’m not one of those people who tick countries on maps, and “do” South Africa, and so on, I tend to settle and spend some time in locations, make friends, and hang out in its out-of-the-way places. I suppose I’d have to say India was one of the most enjoyably strange and completely otherworldly places I’ve lived; a great deal of tasty lotus-eating went on there.
You characterise your music as being Alt-rock, dark-folk, & folk-rock music. How do writing sessions usually begin for you?
I’m transgenre. I cite those genres because as a songwriter you’re forced to pick your poisons. I’d prefer to call it Dark, Metamorphic Folkgrunge-rock, Guitarwave, or perhaps facetiously, Thinkhouse, but nobody would find it. My music is several multi-colored lizards crawling on a wall in a beautifully-lit garden that burst into thousands of shining golden ants for some, and is “out of tune” for others. I breathe through my guitar, I spend hours upon hours just playing discursively; tunes and melodies pop out, they generally come with a contingent conceptual idea, I tend to work out the song musically more or less on the spot, and then devote considerable time – even years sometimes – laying down the lines of proper words like Theseus’ lifelines of twine through the Labyrinth. A fair amount of fine creativity and development happens during the recording and mixing process, and via the miscellaneous inputs of the artists and engineers I work with.
Your lyrics are poetic, do you have a favourite poet?
Yes I do, James K Baxter, an itinerant New Zealand Bohemian writer who died the same year I was born. He genuinely lived (and died) his art, combining Classical, Maori, and Catholic imagery, alcohol, love, thought, and passion, and evinced that magic with language that relatively few ever master – where one, in reading it, is just struck by the craftsmanship in lines of words that feel as though they were developed only to belong right there, in the given line. I frequently have that sense when I listen to Bob Dylan’s earlier Rimbaud-driven songs.
“But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar
Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter
To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.”
and
The whispering cliffs like a great hive of bees
Echo the sea god’s voice. There is no other
Language that I understand
Now that the Queen has closed her door on me
And the young girls in their pink blouses
Shouting along the sandy track
Belong to other men — Blessed Be
The sea god’s hammer that will break
Dome after dome the cages of the land
And set the dead men free. There is no need
For my invented language where the light
Splinters upon the coffins of the sea.
Words and ideas are an absolutely huge part of music for me. I used to say Roger Waters was more of a father to me than my own father was.
Having travelled around the world is there anywhere that you would have liked to have gone to?
Yes, I’ve never been in the jungles of Borneo. Having grown up amid the wealth of remarkable documentaries made with David Attenborough, I’ve always wanted to see some of that majestic habitat beserkley thronging with surreal amounts and variety of life.
You have played concerts in Istanbul what’s your favourite venue and why?
Istanbul is a strange mother: old, ordered chaos; almost devoid of originality, it fobs a thousand cover bands, and yet has been nothing but hospitable to our group, and we play no covers at all! It’s been a while since we performed as we’re a local guitarist down, and I haven’t been able to find a replacement yet, but I’ve always liked gigging at a little spot called Pendor Corner; a tiny venue, a tiny stage, but friendly people, and a friendly crowd. I filmed some of my Lonely Gnome music clip there, as it happens.
Tell us a funny story from the road.
It was in May that my associate, Fatih Aygün and I recorded “A Winter Song”.
I wrote it on the train from Istanbul to Bucharest one fierce, snowy winter, heading out from Sultanahmet in the darkness before sunrise, not sure if I’d be back, saying farewell to a girlfriend, and in the deep throes of the kind of cold you catch when you are new to a hemisphere and have no natural resistance built-up to the local strains. A pharmacist had given me a packet of little yellow remedial pills, which were neither little, nor ineffective, and the resultant journey was quite a trip.
.
I hung out in my cabin with the window pulled open wide – the freezing air flowing as the train click-clacked through the Bulgarian plains of snow and ice – blue in a crystalline moonlight – and over wet wooden bridges across creaking, frozen rivers… the rhythm of the clickkitty-clack train clickkitty-clacks throughout the song. Twenty-something hours later I reached the border, where the Romanian border police were delighted to spot the guitar and insisted I play them a few songs – I played “Cocaine Blues” because I thought that was ironic, and soon I was through and on my way towards the capital. Little did I know, the police had subsequently realised that the little visa I was supposed to have got hadn’t been got, heh heh…
I arrived at Bucharest central station, after something like 30 hours of the little yellow pills, and was immediately descended upon by seven, count ’em, 7 police officers who came upon me from all directions at once as though they had been expecting me to make a run for it with my pack and a freaking guitar to boot, and I was marched in silence through the station to a waiting car which they motioned for me to get into. “Is there some problem?” I innocently enquired…
Inside the car were my two friends from the border, who had evidently been required to pursue the train in their own car for several hours through the snow, and we chatted happily about rock ‘n roll as we drove all the hours back to the border. As we approached the border they suddenly became less genial, and summarily and professionally evicted me into… well, the middle of nowhere, really. It was something like 5am and possibly minus 15°C. It stung to breathe. I walked for a while in the general direction they had motioned, under a clear dark sky of merciless ice, and soon came upon the rather inhospitable Bulgarian border. The patrol guards there left me standing, waiting in the snow for about half an hour. They were surly. I, on the other hand, was contemplating freezing to death, feeling it entering my bones, but thanks to the yellow pills, doing so happily enough.
Eventually I got through, and was ejected back into the snow, god-knew where, on the Bulgarian side of things. I tried hitchhiking for quite a while, but the trucks simply weren’t interested. Finally, I got a taxi, which took me into the nearest town – for a fee – the dreaded town of Ruse. It had been my mission this journey NOT to get stuck in Ruse. I’d stayed there for a couple of weeks a couple of years earlier. It was a great wee town, but seedy, whorey, with marijuana plants growing up through cracks in the pavements in the streets, and quite dangerous for a lone young traveller with a pack and a guitar, and therefore not so fleet of foot. I was immediately besieged by pimps and prostitutes and the kinds of guys who want to take you places that don’t look like the places they were taking you… But I was interested only in boarding the next train out.
Eventually, after a tiresome wait of some long hours, I got the next train out, which happened to be heading towards Veliko Tarnovo. I have friends there, and had lived there for a while a couple of times before… the train was delectably slow, and I was in a cabin with a nutter— a mental youth with no English who wanted to freestyle rap in Bulgarian while I beat out a rhythm for him on my guitar. There was a calmer, more cerebral young man in there too, and we chatted in between interruptions from the unit. Eventually I got to Stara Zagora where I had to wait about four more hours for a trundling domestic train to Veliko Tarnovo. The unit waited with me. He hated gypsies, and pow-pow shot at families of them with his fingers as we left the station to go looking for an internet cafe in which to pass the time. On the way he comprehensively kicked in the side of a parked car, and not especially wanting to be killed at this point, I split. Waiting in the station, I entertained a crowd of people playing some tunes. Anji …
I don’t know how many hours I’d been awake now but it was more than a couple of days.
Finally I was on the train and headed for Veliko Tarnovo. It was an electric train and we climbed the iron rails into the black mountain forests… but there was an electrical fault above my carriage, and where the pantograph met the overhead wire it was a live frenzy of lightning – blue electricity blazed, and rained sparks, and zapped, and popped – it was a dazzling strobed-frenzy all the way… climbing along the narrow tracks up into deep mountain forest, where the white, snowy, rock cliff walls raced past the window an arm’s length from my nose, sparking in mesmerising blue strobe-light and suddenly dropping away into valleys of shadow overlooking vast plains, with the tiny lights of small far away villages set in the blackness below, before suddenly slamming back into the strobed racing walls of snow… I stood at the open window, the freezing wind on my face, and hardly blinked. It was one of the most beautiful and surreal experiences I’ve ever had …in the corporeal world.
I arrived in Veliko Tarnovo in the early hours of the morning, and not wanting to wake my friend unannounced, I sought out an all-night internet cafe I knew of, where I began to write some emails. In those days, internet cafes in the wee hours were porn dens for the lonely. The chap who was running it came up to me after a while and knelt down beside me. He said “if there’s anything you want, let me know”. I looked at him in a way that intimated that the thing I wanted was for him to get lost, and he repeated his statement while making a squeezy-squeezy gesture down low with his hand. I thanked him for his hospitality, but explained that I just wanted to send a few emails and to get back to writing them. He went away, but later, at one point, I went to the toilet, and came out to find him loitering outside the door. Hmmm. As the sky began to bruise, the place began to fill with cleaner school-children, getting in a few online games before school, or possibly in lieu of it. Then, naturally enough, a very drunk old sea-dog decided to take some kind of incomprehensible exception to me. He stood up, and slobbering and frothing at the mouth pointed his meaty knuckle at me and shouted things in aggressive Bulgarian. I watched him more or less unperturbed because, you see, after something like 50 hours of travelling, a deportation, and general poly-national tripping, not much was coming as any surprise to me now. So it continued. Many of the children began looking at me for a response in a way that made it fairly clear the old sailor wasn’t issuing a deluge of compliments. Mr Squeezy ignored it, save for a smirk. Finally, I too stood up and delivered a speech Denzel Washington would have been proud of, not at the drunken sailor, but at Mr Squeezy, about how I had come to his internet cafe to use the internet and to send a few emails, and about how I had a right to do that in peace without having to endure harassment from other clients, or anybody, and that it was HIS responsibility, as the proprietor, to ensure that this kind of thing did not happen. He sat, looked coolly unimpressed, and said “not my business”. I told him it WAS his business, and returned to my mail. The sailor eventually shut up, and when it was light I went out and met my friend.
Strangely, sleep was now no longer a viable option, and when, later that night, sometime approaching midnight, or 3am or 2pm, who knows, who cares, my friend was safely drunkenly comatose on the floor in the hallway just outside his bathroom which he had failed to make it to thanks to the large bottle of Mastika that was now no more, I decided to head out into town to see what was there to find. I soon met a drunk guy, and at his suggestion, we jumped into a taxi together and headed out to the only club still open, on the outskirts of the town … a very mafia place.
That was ok. We sat at a big table in the big leather seats with a group of his friends and drank this and that, interestingly, several people at several points wanted to know if the leatherman I had attached to my belt was a gun, and then I decided to head on. I asked for the bill and that’s when things took a new and exciting turn. My new friend and one or two of his cohorts seemed to expect me to pay for them. I however, didn’t share any such wish, and paid for my own drinks, and readied to leave. The waiters closed and bolted the door, shutting me in. Hmmm, I thought. Hmmmm. Not so good. I talked to the waiter and said “I’ve paid my bill, correct? So now I’d like to leave”. He didn’t really seem to know how to handle the situation. He looked a bit shifty and uncertain. Maybe it was his first time? Suffice to say, they would not let me leave. I soon asked them to call the police, which didn’t happen. Eventually, after some negotiation, they let me out, whereupon two of my new friends immediately physically attacked me.
It was a long, long, long fight, involving much rolling around on the ground, failed punches, some kicking, more rolling around on the ground. My main recollection of this is being really, really, tired. It was quite a workout. I eventually got away, unscathed, and ran. As I was chugging down a country road, a police car raced by with its lights on. The dawn was breaking, and I realised my belt-bag – replete with passport, and all my money and bank cards – was not on my person any more. Well……, shit.
.
After some walking, I found my way back to the city, and spied two beefy security guards sitting in a car outside a bank, guarding stuff. Bulgarian men tend to be rather chunky. They eat a lot of meat and pieces of metal, and security guards top it off with old-school steroids. These were big guys with fat heads and big, folded necks. I asked in my appalling Bulgarian where the police station was. They grunted uninterestedly. I did my best to communicate that it was terribly important. They gestured vaguely in some direction. I got quite angry then, and threw open the back door of their car and sat down in the back seat, demanding they take me to the police station. They didn’t. It was now daylight, and the city was filling with the bright, showered, and bleary clear-eyed working classes, you know how it is, when you haven’t actually finished your bender, let alone a drug/cold-fuelled four-day international one… I got out and slammed the door rather pissed off with their level of unhelpfulness, and went and found the police station on foot.
There, I was chuffed to find my new friend, freshly and apparently rather thoroughly fisted by the police and crying like a little girl. The police handed me my passport and bank cards that they’d recovered, and, well, everything except all my money, which never turned up. It wasn’t much, maybe 100 lira or less. And after the standard interviews, I was soon free… hungry, alive, intact, with a new song, and ready for a weeeeee sleep.
That’s where A Winter Song comes from.
Watch here
What are your three favourite things about Istanbul?
It’s a relatively safe chaos. Easy is boredom, and boredom is the enemy, and here, really, nothing is ever easy. It’s a city that offers certain characters endless adventure, without too much risk of having limbs hacked off, give or take the odd bomb. Touch wood. New Zealand is a sleepy village with far too many sheep, but the people tend to be curious about the outside world due to the geographical isolation of their glistening pearl at the bottom of the world. People in Istanbul are similarly welcoming and curious about the outside world due to their cultural isolation, and aversion to stepping outside of it. Finally, the climate – two seasons to note – long, blazingly hot summers, and cold, blue-skied winters.
What are you listening to at the moment?
I listen to a lot of older stuff like most people do, rock, blues, and poetic folk from the 60s and 70s mostly. But I’m also enjoying Earthless, a phenomenal, crushing, psychedelic (stoner) rock group from California.
What are you looking forward to doing most in 2025?
The imminent release of Moonfrog, our newest single. I’m working virtually at nights these days with our mixer, Forest Little in The Netherlands. It’s another of our happy collaborations with England’s mighty John Byrne on lead guitar. It’s a fun, heavy rock song which operates lyrically on several levels, and should be out on streaming platforms – and up on sale in Bandcamp – within the next few weeks.
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PS from Del:Tea, biscuits and a chat is great fun, but just a couple of things to note:
1. It’s virtual.
2. If you bring anything with raisins you will be banned. (You won’t but biscuits with raisins are diabolical and should be banned forever.)
3. In order to be featured, the general rule is that I pick artists with a bit of a backstory, so it’s best to keep your bio available somewhere online. Your Soundcloud profile will be a good idea.
4. Tea, biscuits and a chat is available to anyone who’s submitted a track. Please don’t email me about it please make sure you have submitted a track to the FOTN inbox. If you are a representative for the artist then you’re more than welcome to email me AFTER submission. Interviews are always done by email, and the artist will need to tell me what their favourite biscuits are.
5. Interviews are published Thursdays and Sundays.
6. Finally, I like my tea with milk, one sugar!
Thanks for reading!
