music

  • Reality Pills, the second full-length album from Italian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Molto Ohm, is sonic pharmacology for the overs(t)imulated—a quasi-ambient pop album that explores the psychic toll of life lived through screens.

    Nodding to philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, the album explores how digital representations, once reflections of the real, have become more vivid, more compelling, and ultimately more “real” than reality itself. Reality Pills offers a prescription that is both critique and salve: immersive, reflective, and subtly disorienting.

    Each of the album's nine tracks is named after a fictional medicine: Vantorinex, Clymperid, Zorvitol, Lunovarine, etc. These invented substances act as affective remedies, mimicking the promises of real-world pharmaceuticals and algorithmically tailored experiences. Some tracks feel warm and hopeful, offering ambient calm and a glimmer of sonic hope, while others introduce dissonance and dark emotional undercurrents.

    Medicine, like technology, is never neutral: it can soothe and poison, heal and harm. We seek calm, but consume chaos. We retreat for relief, but find ourselves embedded in a never-ending feed of stimulation — political spectacle, wellness rituals, AI-generated comfort — all united by a permeating sense of unease. Technology becomes both mirror and mask, comfort and control.

    To capture this dichotomy, Molto Ohm set out to refine the sound-collage approach of his live performances, defined by layering his recent work with long-collected synth ideas, corporate messaging, environmental sounds, choir fragments, and pop songs, into a deliberate studio form.

    The album was built from a core palette of hardware synths, guitar run through pedal effects, and a wide spectrum of voices —a choir comprised of Molto Ohm’s layered vocals, voiceovers, artificial voices, archival recordings, and guest contributions from producer and multi-instrumentalist Jachary (L'Rain, Tasha), psych-pop project Tanners, guitarist Aditya Chatterjee, and touring pianist Puck (King Princess, SZA).

    Whereas Molto Ohm’s previous album FEED felt agitated, overclocked, and crowded, Reality Pills is the aftermath, a numbed exhale. From artificially-narrated affirmations about the power and importance of the body (“Trivaxon”) to the uncanny recital of Dove™ product names over eerie sonic atmospheres (“Zorvitol”), Reality Pills dwells in the blurred space between critical resistance and commodified comfort, where human and digitized voices meet. Sounds are muted, and voices sing melodies of longing and love over beds of atonal synths and unsettling laments. Are they saviors, or just sirens’ calls?

    Reality Pills moves swiftly through this contradiction, building up a pharmaco-digital environment where emotion is outsourced and human intimacy is filtered through synthetic layers. This is ambient music for a world where care is commercialized, authenticity is commodified, and the ‘Real’ is presented to us muted, curated, and softly lethal.

    Reality Pills is available via Soap Library in digital and cassette formats on February 27, 2026. Each tape comes with a (pre-scratched) 1970s-era lottery ticket — a sliver of hope in the form of a randomized reward. What are you hoping to win? Maybe you already have. 

  • Daily existence is rapidly evolving, with rituals that once occurred entirely in the real world happening increasingly behind screens. It’s a change that has left many feeling trapped within a pane of glass. Moreover, in the past five decades, traditional social safety nets have increasingly given way to an ethos of personal responsibility. The onus is now on individuals to care for themselves, with any failure to achieve a balanced life being seen as their own fault, perpetuating a cycle of stress, abandonment and anxiety. 

    In FEED, an ambitious debut album by Molto Ohm, creator Matteo Liberatore urges us to confront these realities. The project highlights how capitalism’s relentless drive to commodify everything has left many subjugated by the promises of an unattainable life. Advertising, consumer technology, and the culture of self-optimization dangle visions of happiness, peace, and prosperity. Deep down, we know that these promises are often hollow, designed to sustain an economy where alienation and dissatisfaction drive consumption. Yet, the pull remains powerful, leaving many feeling estranged from themselves and their world. 

    The aim of FEED is to capture the battles between material comfort and bodily alienation; ecstasy and ennui; engagement and weariness. To establish this, Liberatore recontextualizes familiar signifiers: Heavy dance beats, glitchy effects, connection static, motivational speeches, sales pitches, podcast-like confessions, and (faux) ads. The sonics span EDM and abstraction; snippets of yearning songs flash by, and dissonance interrupts lulls. Commanding synths shimmer and stab, while wavy melodies offset the tension. Wistfulness is ever-present, Liberatore conveying that something is being lost. The music looking to a new paradigm.

    As an immigrant that moved to New York from a small village in central Italy, Liberatore experienced the cultural shift of transitioning from a stereotypically quiet and idyllic place to the world capital of art and capitalism. After more than a decade in New York and the absorption in the experimental music world (with albums and countless collaborations with Mark Kelley, Elliott Sharp, Taja Cheek, Gold Dime, Amirtha Kidambi, Ava Mendoza, Brian Chase and many more) Liberatore felt the urge to come to terms with his hybrid existence, reconnect to his lost teenage years overseas, the love of italian pop music, 90s Eurodance nostalgia, small manual cars, the waveless Adriatic sea, and to make sense of this constant feeling of unrest and race towards an elusive, imagined destination.

    Liberatore anchors FEED’s production in a loud, contemporary style that marries hyperpop energy and festival friendliness, complicating it with atonal timbres, environmental sounds, and human voices. The music morphs and shifts. The quiet moments are brief and artificial; soulful warmth flickers; noise bursts through, disrupting the transmission. Maybe we can still push back against the corporate machine and retain a hint of autonomy, imperfection, and organic beauty. The inclusion of a Mark Fisher quote in track nine, After All (Mark) is fitting. “After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable, and incomprehensible, in our hyper stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy.” Like the critic-turned-theorist, Liberatore confronts shattering and incomprehensible dread in our overstimulated lives, where even “calm joy” has been heavily commodified and sold to the willing bidder, leaving no escape for the soul.