THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Chime Oblivion is the new project from Osees mastermind John Dwyer, featuring Dave Barbarossa (Adam & The Ants, Bow Wow Wow, Fine Young Cannibals), Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers, Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus), Tom Dolas (Osees, Mr Elevator), H.L. Nelly (Naked Lights, FKA Smiley) and Brad Caulkins (Bent Arcana, With Egg).
Chime Oblivion began out of the blue. Barbarossa reached out to Dwyer, saying he was a fan of Osees. He was invited to a show in London. The two hung out and hit it off. “Then I rabbitholed on Bow Wow Wow too,” Dwyer recalls. “I reached out to David and suggested that we try and write some songs together… I flew David out, we met at my studio and spent five days writing (bass and drums) ideas.” The two got to know each other and had a lot of laughs.
Dwyer then brought in Weasel Walter, knowing that he would be perfect “to add all that legitimate old-school, weird proto-punk no-wave guitar scratch to it, which of course he did masterfully.” Next came Dolas to play fuzzy marimba, and the fabulous Nelly, “as I knew her from a record I’d put out back in the day for a band called Naked Lights from Oakland. I knew that she could pull off the vocal style I had in mind.”
Together, the group created their debut self-titled album, which Dwyer rightly claims is tailor-made “for fans of Adam & The Ants, Bow Wow Wow, Crass, The Slits and any other wierdo punk we fell in love with as youths.”
