ookpikk

Total Home Job
(So Called Recordings)
Dan Godlovitch (a.k.a. Ookpikk) has clearly turned his Victoria home studio into a lab for the dissection and synthesis of electronic sounds of all kinds, with a mission to go beyond genre. The album kicks off with two deceptively accessible tracks—including the perfectly house-flavoured “Hair Suite�—before launching into more experimental territory with disjointed melodies, polyrhythms and a handful of satisfying dissonance. “Squire Twain, His Merry Men� plays with an onslaught of drum and bass beats, while “Wisps� and “Mr. Carnivale� offer layers of chopped-up tunes bouncing off each other and the percussion patterns. “Shop Teacher� starts by machine-gunning a heavy synth bass-line which almost mutates into a hookline, while the hazier textures and stabs in the far background sound like they’d be at home on an early album from Berlin’s Pole.
There’s real energy in this album, and with its dominant analog-synth sound, Total Home Job is more engaging and less freeze-dried than a lot of electronica out there, but it sometimes misses the spaciousness of other electronica and the energy can tip over into busy-ness. That said there’s plenty to enjoy here, both on the first encounter and after repeated listenings; as under the busy surface there’s a lot more detail and delight to discover.
E.E. Mason
- Discorder

Ookpikk, a.k.a. B.C.'s Daniel Godlovitch, has a one-up on most electronic bedroom producers creeping into the scene these days. Sure, his music is scattered in blips and bleeps, strange beats and messed up metronomes that you could almost call experimental. But while he tweaks, flanges and filters his many synthesizers, he also manages to keep melody in mind. There are grooves here, not just noises, and this is what makes Ookpikk’s music something the listener is able to digest a little more than a bunch of noise attacks worthy of musical seizures. There are scary moments of drum 'n' bass influence where Total Home-Job feels dated and there's very little to dance to, but, for the most part, the album is packed with noises and ideas from the future and is worthy of exploration. - Chartattack

OOKPIKK: Total Home-Job
Nov 20, 2008
By Lisa Hresko

Canadian-based electronic musician Dan Godlovitch is a purveyor of IDM—that's "intelligent dance music" to anyone outside the nerdy (and arguably not danceable) subgerne's walls—but his music can't be so easily pigeonholed. Yes it's smart, but it's simultaneously playful, and paradoxically warm and chilly. And it might be better to replace "dance" with "awkwardly endearing shuffle," as the music's movements, marked by minimalist textures and buzzy (the sound, not the web phenomena) blips, make it difficult to pin down the ambient sound.

A strange concoction of kraut-rock roots eschewed in favor of modern, abstract noise mixed with electro-slumberland pop creates a pleasant, calm and technology-ridden soundscape. Godlovitch's pristine moniker does the wintry sound justice: ookpik means "snowy owl" in Inuktitut. And the title, Total Home-Job? Godlovitch mixed and mastered the record himself in his home studio in Victoria, British Columbia. - College Music Journal