August 22, 2022 - Self-released
There is a lot of bad when it comes to abstract sound art. By that, I mean that there are a lot of artists who are unable to pull off the fearlessness that it takes to communicate well in this mode. Many try, and they get wrapped up in the cool factor of messing with synths live at some underground art opening in a basement, wrapped up in that armor and creating thin crackers for communion. They feel safe in the abstraction because, if the audience can’t easily read what they are thinking about, and they don’t get anything from it, it’s on the audience, not them. They think the onus is on the audience to communicate what the work is. Dead wrong.
Doing something abstract is profound when it’s done right. It teaches you something about the performer and yourself. Something is at stake because the creator is injecting some vulnerability into the act of creation. And most have spent hours, days, months, and years obsessively distilling a concept down into its core essence. This is the minimum viable product, the stimmung that makes it unmistakably itself yet superficially unrecognizable. And they’ve brought us here to force us past our quick reads and our short attention spans and gift us the ability to see something else. It’s so hard to learn anything with depth anymore.
UK producer and turntablist NikNak aka Nicole Raymond demonstrates a mastery of communicating atmospheric imagery with sound in her Chasing Solitude project, where she transforms the turntable into a world-builder, transcending its typical constraints by recontextualizing sounds we know into something entirely new and other. Recorded during NikNak’s live set at 2022’s Deliaphonic Festival in Coventry, the album consists of seven tracks, a loose poetic arc from start to finish. It’s a slice-of-life story about the need for Black women to find solitude and rest unapologetically and how she finds it. Sampled space comms become a conversation with the overactive mind. Vinyl scratches become a flock of seagulls above as footsteps shuffle below. Thunder rumbles in the distance. Your brain syncs its waves in time to a deep pulsing under the ground, felt in your feet. Strings pluck themselves violently into war with each other, personified, human, relatable, turmoil. Chasing Solitude is both a meditative exercise and an epic poem, a sound bath of living and breathing reactions to a moment.
What I find the most interesting about Raymond’s work is how earthy the tracks feel despite their digital identities. Chasing Solitude feels of the backcountry, not of the dancefloor. Parts feel pre-historic, while others feel post-historic. Once you immerse yourself in this sound art project, you’ll find yourself lost in nature, hiking through a temperate, steamy deciduous forest, blinded by sudden beams of sunlight at times, heart racing at times, endlessly calm at times, dependent upon the whims of the weather and the generosity of the ecosystem. NikNak’s ecosystem.
Chasing Solitude is her planet, her environment, her life forms, her wilderness, and her perspective manifested for you to experience too. Tread with ease but don’t forget the power of this gift she gives you. Just listen, hear it. Don’t geotag it. ☔