reviews / 2009

NOSAJ THING - Drift

Name: NOSAJ THING – Drift
Item: Drift
Rating: 7
Author: Marco Sgrignoli

2009 (Alpha pup)

glitch-hop

by Marco Sgrignoli

A back to the future trip for the nostalgic: getting your hands back on the dusty cables of Hal 9000, the flickering glow of "Tron", the pre-internet depths of "Neuromancer". Only to discover that the myth can't be restored, just evoked through crumpled reminiscences: ruins, lost in empty space.

Cyberpunk melancholy: a landscape of cold hip-hop beats populated by analog ghosts, fossil breaths dissolved into the rarefied sound. They emerge through damaged, slowed-down echoes; faded by magnetic memories, now they're gloomy synth pads dripping with reverb.

Diaphanous, austerely in a minor key, "Drift" glows with an arctic majesty. "Coat Of Arms" is Dubstep from deep in an ice age, lethargic and solemn; "Light 1" and "Light 2" are cathedrals of light and ice, abstract organ pipes jutting skyward.

Even more so, "Drift" carries you into a new Middle Ages, a digital oblivion in which scattered traces of the past resurface, fogged over and blurred together. "1685" is a "Glitched On Bach" rendered illegible by ink now faded, "Caves" layers the haze of Aphex Twin and the worn-down beats of Flying Lotus, merging them into a single memory.

The undisputed queen is the desolation of Boards of Canada. Queen of shadows, of ruins and eternal snows, because human warmth has been forgotten, imprisoned forever between old wires and new databases.

Jason Chung, aka Nosaj Thing, is twenty-five years old and lives in Los Angeles. This is his debut LP.

Ride the wave of great music

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18/11/2009

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Marco Sgrignoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition