Sneakily rolled out at the tail end of 2023 whilst most were preoccupied with the customary pre-seasonal meltdowns/excessive alcohol consumption and subsequently missed by a good few appreciative ears was this gem of a record from mysterious French outfit Nina Harker. There's a reason why records aren't generally released at the arse-end of December, but I don't suppose these two much care for convention. Retaining the collagistic, free-ranging approach of their cultish debut from four years back and incorporating the avant-folk sensibilities of the Kou project with which they're also connected, there's a simultaneous expressing of both European arthouse tradition and a boldly singular sense of the new. It's tempting to make comparisons to Vox Populi and even Faust, so strong is the suggestion of a set of musicians operating independently and off-grid, while you can easily imagine Stroom having dug up these sounds from some long lost edition of 16 cassette from 1984 (think Saskia, Hessel Veldman, Enno Velthuys et al). And yet here we are in the here and now. This aint no museum piece. Contemporaries of this calibre are light on the ground, but if they've any modern kin you might find it lurking somewhere in Rotterdam around the Goldblum lot, or, somewhat inevitably, the outer-edges of Gothenburg's weirder folk iconoclasts. Typically, none of that is exactly on the money, which alone reveals that we're dealing with something particularly special, but if there's one comparison I couldn't truly shake it's Hype Williams, back when they were an out-of-nowhere phenomenon tinkering around and debasing the sounds no-one else thought to tune in to. So there it is, my one line summary: Hype Williams were they raised on European cafe culture instead of MTV, and cracked just so the dark can seep in. Real blackest ever black coffee business.
