Nika Son
LP
V I S
Aslope is Nika Son’s second album after her debut in 2020 (To Eeyore on Entr’acte) and brings together various compositions from the past three years.
Even though the album doesn’t address a consistent theme throughout, it is the night and its capability to shift our perception and memory, that link the pieces together.
Some of the tracks are extracted from multi-sound installations, sound video works or radio pieces created in recent years and reworked into autonomous pieces.
For the label V I S it’s her second release, after the EP Tennø with the project C (now called Cwelle, together with the musician F#X) in 2016.
Label: V I S
Release date: 7th June 2024
Mastering: Kris Jakob (Tonal Bias)
Cover artwork and Layout : Oliver Pitt
Distributed by: Boomkat & Morr Music
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Boomkat review:
(…)
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.
(…)
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.
read whole review here