NNA Tapes Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 8 Items

Touching upon post-rock, trance, ambient, and more to create a colossal sonic world all of its own, Brooklyn-based electronic producer Rachika Nayar's second full-length is a dizzying plunge through the conflicted worlds of desire and grandiose fantasy. On Our Hands Against the Dusk, Nayar used her guitar as the primary source for sound design, mutating the instrument beyond recognition through layers of digital processing. Heaven Come Crashing retains the mangled guitar stylings, but expands the color palette with rapturous supersaw harmonies, M1 piano stabs, and glimpses of Amen breaks. Despite the manifold influences entering the frame, at its heart, a throughline remains: a breakneck exploration of desperate passion—romantic, nocturnal, and reckless in its velocity and emotional abandon. ~~~ “Fantasy is scenario, but a scenario in bits and pieces—always very brief, just a glimmer of the narrative of desire. What’s glimpsed is very sharply contoured, very brightly lit, but all of a sudden it’s gone: a body I catch sight of in a car as it goes round a bend, before it plunges into the shadows“

Ohyung is an Asian American musician and artist based in Brooklyn. Their debut album 'Untitled (Chinese Man with Flame)' was released by Deathbomb Arc in 2020, and their sophomore album Protector — also released in 2020, via Chinabot — was an experimental rap cross-genre collision course through distorted 808s, pitch-shifted rapping, frenetic pop energy, and ambient loops. In 2022, Ohyung will release their first ambient album 'imagine naked!' with NNA Tapes. Created in collaboration with poet t. tran le, each song is paired with a line from t. tran le's poem "vegetalscape." t. tran le describes their poem: "most of my work comes back to living with mental illness, snapshots of things I still made beautiful in my own little world despite dealing with something so debilitating. my bedroom garden, for example. also i miss my brother’s voice! & he does take like hour-long showers singing the whole time lol." Ohyung composes music for films and exhibitions as Robert Ouyang Rusli, and their work has been featured at Sundance, BAMCinématek, the Queens Museum, and BAM Next Wave Festival. In 2017, they received a Van Lier Fellowship in Music Composition from the Asian American Arts Alliance. They are a 2021 Pioneer Works Music Resident.

Metal Aether': ‘Metal Aether’ continues to explore Lea’s acute interest in the nature of acoustics and the harmonic accumulation of sound, with it’s four pieces having been recorded in Le Havre, France in a former military base, and in New York City, at Issue Project Room. With her horn, Lea produces pulsing minimalist patterns, transcendent drones, and upper register squalls that envelop these spaces in waves of overtones, microtones, and psychoacoustic effects. ‘Metal Aether’ feels like the defining statement from an artist in elevated control of their form - a summary of concepts, ideas, and emotions given life from one’s mind and heart. Lea demonstrates the desirable ability to use her art to sincerely communicate in a language of one’s own personal invention, utilizing music and sound for their most meaningful and human purposes. 'Resonant Field': It is with tremendous pleasure that we announce ‘Resonant Field’, the brand new full-length album from New York-based sound artist and composer Lea Bertucci. Following up her critically acclaimed 2018 NNA full-length ‘Metal Aether’, Lea continues her devotion to the exploration of physical spaces by way of sound, channeled through her alto saxophone. Where her previous work investigated a variety of locations around the globe, ‘Resonant Field’ narrows her focus to one space in particular - the Marine A Grain Elevator at Silo City in Buffalo, New York. This formation of an intimate connection with her surroundings is both scientific and spiritual, putting Lea in a duality of roles as both an archaeologist of sound and as a sonic medium. The fact that these recordings took place during the partial solar eclipse of 2017 further contributes to the ceremonial, ritual quality of the work, making ‘Resonant Field’ a profound, industrial meditation on beauty, emptiness, and the deep melancholy of forgotten spaces.

Pluperfect Mind, the NNA Tapes debut from the 23-year-old UK-based musician Dear Laika (a.k.a. Isabelle 'Izzy' Thorn), is an extraordinary creation ' a beautiful and unique oddity which exists in the liminal space between dreamworlds and a blurry, watercolored version of reality. It is a reflection on the past few years of Izzy's life, during which she sought solitude in the North Wessex Downs while beginning her gender transition. The album is a beguiling collection of vivid lyrics and celestial song, bound together with digital glitch and field recordings of flora and fauna. Comparisons can be made to Björk, Tim Hecker or Bat For Lashes, but ultimately, Dear Laika's exploration of the experimental and the mystical builds something intricate and intimate that is truly original and bewitching.

We're delighted to welcome Los Angeles-based producer Ahnnu, aka Leland Jackson, back to NNA Tapes to share his brilliant new full-length album 'Special Forces.' Over the years, Jackson has made his mark on the world of electronic music production not only with his innovative works as Ahnnu, but with his footwork/dance alias Cakedog as well. Following up the 2013 NNA release 'Battered Sphinx,' and more recently 2015's 'Perception' on Leaving Records, Ahnnu returns to push his sound collage expeditions further into the deep beyond by excavating fragments and ethos from music history's past and infusing them with the electronic frequencies of a future landscape.

“Magenta Line” is the debut recorded offering from the Fox/Soper Duo, consisting of New York City musicians Greg Fox on drums, and Ryan Soper on modular synthesizer. Soper, an inventive sculptor, video artist, and modular synthesist makes up one half of the NYC-based performance project Non-Native, and is also a member of the A/V trio Brat Pit. Fox is a prolific drummer known for his work in experimental metal outfit Liturgy, as well as bands such as Guardian Alien and Zs, not to mention countless collaborations ranging from Colin Stetson to Dan Deacon to Hieroglyphic Being. On “Magenta Line”, the duo takes on a form that is unexpected for an acoustic-meetselectronic style collaboration. Fox’s drums are slightly filtered and engineered to take on an alien, electronic quality that compliments Soper’s organic, expressive execution of his synth, to the point where the two styles meet in the middle to produce fierce and otherworldly results. For an instrument that manipulates purely electronic impulses, Soper manages to play it in an incredibly physical manner, buzzing, squealing, and roaring in all it’s distorted glory like an electric guitar. Fox’s ability to react and interact naturally with Soper’s synth is remarkable, and a rare feat that few drummers can effectively accomplish. The outcome of this fusion is a style that leans more towards industrial, punk, or metal than it does to jazz or modern improvisation. Unrelenting in it’s exploration, “Magenta Line” gives way to a new style altogether, yielding nearly 45 minutes of uninterrupted gritty and grinding cyborg thrash. Both artists demonstrate a very high level of skill and versatility with their chosen instrument. Fox and Soper each speak their own alien musical language to each other, meeting head-to-head in terms of the range of expression they can achieve with their expansive arsenal of mastered techniques. At times, Soper’s distorted sequences lock into place, providing the rhythmic backdrop for Fox to drum circles around, while at other times Fox lays down heavy, direct beats for Soper to explore the full range of free electronic shredding his synth is capable of. Musical form is firmly established, while extreme sonic and textural freedom is still allowed. “Magenta Line” is a marathon session where new ground is constantly being broken with powerful, crushing physicality. Although the instrumentation is unorthodox for an improvisational duo, the results are incredibly dynamic and exploratory when left in the hands of masterful musicians.