Veröffentlicht
May 28, 2024
- The UK turntablist comes out of her dark ambient shell with energetic forays into drum & bass, dubstep and trip-hop.
- Just over a year ago, Leeds-based turntablist and producer NikNak was grappling with how to balance her vast musical interests in an industry known for pigeonholing artists to a single genre or scene. Her cherished experiments in sound design, made with turntables, feature dark, immersive ambient soundscapes, while her DJ sets are devoted to rare groove, jazz and dubstep. "It felt like I was having to split off into two different people," NikNak, real name Nicole Raymond, told an interviewer at last year's Eavesdropping Festival in London. "I don't want to keep doing that, because it's very exhausting."
She brings her many sonic worlds together on Ireti, her fourth full-length, out on Matthew Herbert's Accidental Records. It's a concept album set in the distant future about an intergalactic war between humans and machines. "If there was a Black Blade Runner, this would be the soundtrack," Raymond, a Black, self-avowed video-game nerd, says in the album notes. In exploring this sci-fi theme, she supplements her ambient sound design with drum & bass, cavernous dub and jazzy downtempo. Ireti is very much a hybrid album. Thrilling club tracks are interspersed around beatless compositions that are impressively built but throw off the album's early momentum.
Two breakbeat-oriented cuts early on set the album in motion. The first, "You Were Supposed to be Good," has a starry melodic line from trumpeter Grifton Forbes-Amos and saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi laid over a looping drum shuffle. The aptly titled "12000 RPM" is a scintillating drum & bass speed run with rough-edged breaks and a natural swing that heightens their impact. Other cuts are more atmospheric. On opener "This Pile of Rubber is More Human," Raymond conjures a war of worlds by tweaking scratch samples of fireworks to resemble rocket fire. She drowns out the battlefield in a deep swell of synths and hissing, rattling sound effects. "Mere Data" features a spoken word poem by SlowPitchSound that recalls the murky transmissions of Kode9 and the Spaceape.
Happy to show off the rest of her bag of tricks, Raymond diverts her attention elsewhere on the album. There's dub (the pummeling "Break My Bones"), dreamy trance ("More Life," "Pandora's Box"), dark ambient ("Burning Bright") and trip-hop (closer "You've Never Seen a Miracle"). The production is impressive, each element sharply envisioned and captured. What's at issue here is not execution, but direction. By veering between so many subgenres, the album lacks focus and struggles to establish a sense of pace. This can be disorienting, especially after "You Were Supposed to be Good" and "12000 RPM" gets you craving more NikNak drum production. ("Pandora's Box" teases an arena-sized beat drop, but it's barely audible over the loud synths and UK artist Agaama's vocals.) Past NikNak albums were musically consistent, even if those themes consisted of field recordings and reverb-heavy low end. Ireti is unified in its concept and construction but rhythmically, as in the way an album should flow, it's out of step.
"LOAD OUT" best captures the album's spirit. Shimmering synths are disturbed by glitching sound effects, and halfway through the tension breaks as a furious drum & bass sequence vaporises everything around it. For an artist tired of having to separate her musical identities, this bit of synergetic fusion points to a bright path forward.
Tracklist01. The Pile Of Rubble Is More Human
02. You Were Supposed To Be Good feat. Grifton Forbes Amos & Cassie Kinoshi
03. 12000RPM
04. Break My Bones
05. Mere Data feat. SlowPitchSound
06. Pandora's Box feat. Agaama
07. Burning Bright
08. More Life
09. LOAD OUT
10. Within Cells
11. You've Never Seen A Miracle feat. Grifton Forbes Amos & Cassie Kinoshi