Description
Boomkat Product Review:
Nika Son stitches together spoken word, concrète and extracts from various installations into a hazed ode to the nocturnal world on this highly intoxicating new album, landing somewhere between the surrealist sound poetry of Nozomu Matsumoto, Arthur Lipsett’s abstracted film works and Michèle Bokanowski’s acclaimed scores for her husband Patrick.
Constructed out of the kind ephemeral building blocks conjured in liminal space, Nika Son (Golden Pudel Club, Entr’acte) collages moonlit organ vamps, stifled voices and disembodied, robotic poems on this deliriously slippery album. Heaving from smeary abstraction to penetrable drama, featherlight rhythms are cut short by uncanny voices: “stop, turning, a page,” like some rogue navigation assistant, slicing into ticking clocks and xerox noise.
Like listening to a film without access to its visuals, all the foley sounds remain (windscreen wipers, trains passing, conversations) but we’re left puzzling over what any of it means. The only context provided is from Son herself, who says that although the album doesn’t have a consistent theme, each piece is inspired by the night’s capability to shift our perception and memory. It comes off like a crepuscular sketchbook of ideas and themes that coalesce into an opaque sonic landscape.
It’s music that defies simple categorisation; Son doesn’t tie herself to any identifiable mode of expression, and there are no knowing nods to early electronic innovators either. Rather, she follow her own nose, drawing us into an elusive personal space. On ‘It’s just a cucumber’, environmental recordings are edited just enough to enhance the illusion, before voices curl and decompress into rousing bass womps and unmetered rhythms prickle around punkish shouts. The use of voice is omnipresent throughout, even when not there, they appear on the periphery: on ‘La nuit tombe’, they’re muffled behind echoing footsteps and creepy synth wails, on ‘Gelbes Feld’, incomprehensible chatter envelopes cricket chirps and b-movie arpeggios.
Many artists have tried to map out the dreamworld using sound, but Nika Son takes us to a place that genuinely feels in-between worlds, capturing those moments before vivid memories slip away from the mind’s eye forever.
