(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

In his career, Andrew Hulme (the composer behind the pseudonym O Yuki Conjugate) created a long “relaxation soundtrack,” drawing inspiration from the early records of Durutti Column and Brian Eno’s ambient music.

O Yuki Conjugate, a quartet formed in late 1982 by Andrew Hulme and Roger Horberry in Nottingham, initially also included musicians who had left other British avant-garde rock groups. Their records borrowed from Jon Hassell’s ethno-electronics, the exotic psychedelia of Jade Warrior, ambient music, and techno tribalism.

Their journey began with Scene In Mirage (A-Mission, 1984 - Final Image, 1985), an album that had little in common with the industrial music of the time and was instead closer to new age music. The complexity of its “textures” and its ethnic undertones nevertheless led to comparisons with rock groups such as 23 Skidoo.

The pagan trance of Into Dark Water (Final Image, 1986), reissued as Undercurrents (Staalplaat, 1992), relies on electronic echoes, hypnotic rhythms, sensual voices, and incessant loops (the five additional compositions on the reissue are more explicitly ethnic).

Peyote (Staalplaat, 1991), which collects recordings from 1988 to 1990 and uses real percussion instruments, further defines their evocative, polychromatic music made of spectral atmospheres and exotic timbres. The project excels especially in sparse atmospheres: the emptiness of Snake Charm is filled with tabla rattling and flute cries; electronic dissonance flocks are added to the flute in A Darker Belief; Dusk Dead Heart teems with nocturnal sounds. Still Breath instead opens onto cosmic vastness, and Long Pig reverberates with samples of human and non-human voices.

Thanks to the involvement of Paul Schutze in production, greater attention to detail characterizes the electronic world-music of Equator (Staalplaat, 1995).

Sunchemical (Staalplaat, 1995) is a cycle of compositions dedicated to elements of the periodic table.

Primitive (Staalplaat, 1996) is an anthology of O Yuki Conjugate material dating from 1983–87.

Hulme is also active as A Small Good Thing, alongside guitarist Mark Sedgwick. The sound of this project is a continuous soundtrack for the vast prairies of the Far West, as stated on the album Slim Westerns (Soleilmoon, 1994), music inspired by Steve Roach’s desert “soundscapes” but built around the guitar. Irony may take over in the six tracks of the mini-album Cool Cool Water (Soleilmoon, 1996), which end up sounding self-parodic. The Pink And Purple World of Dishonesty (Soleilmoon, 1997) instead abstracts “lounge music.” Hulme’s postmodern game continues, updated to electronica and techno, in the sinister collage Block (Leaf, 1998).

Hulme was essentially putting to use his experience as a sound engineer for film and television. His reference point was typically film noir (even when he mimicked western-movie soundtracks), since it is the quintessential atmospheric and psychological genre, and his tools were typically ambient, jazz, and electronica - the ones he grew up with. Those who took him seriously saw a metalinguistic study of myth; those who did not, saw only the self-indulgence of someone with easy access to a recording studio and a minimal musical background.

O Yuki Conjugate returned with The Euphoria Of Disobedience (2006) and OYC25 (2009), and collections of leftovers such as Tropic (2017). The project resumed with A Tension of Opposites Vols 1 & 2 (2021) and A Tension of Opposites Vols 3 & 4 (2023). But then Hulme started a new project, Open Yellow Circle, documented on New Meridian (2024) and Black Water Light (2025).