RESTOCK ARRIVING START OF DECEMBER
V I S' Golden Pudel night in Hamburg provides more fertile ground for wayward electronic disorientation with this debut record from affiliated sound artist Nika Son, a truly zoned out sonic presentation that really doubles down on our understandings of liminal spaces and time dilation. Pointedly, time is slipping all over the place here, the confluence of impressionistic electronics and spoken word and musique concrete samples abstracted from context (some of these sounds are said to have been lifted from various uncredited installations) to form a centreless collection that's at once both foggy and concussed. Where are we in the city? Where are we in the night? Where are we in history? The answer seems to be just about anywhere. Like with, say, Actress, the distinction between the avant garde and retrograde is deliberately obscured, and charged with the sense of something breaking down, be that technology, or memory, or - and if you listen to Aslope enough, i don't doubt it - the entire psyche. Think of the soundtrack to Anti-Clock or work of Trevor Mathison transplanted into the West Mineral universe. As an aesthetic, it feels like a very 21st century endeavour. Postmodernism argues history to be flat, but not here - time is dizzying, vertiginous, distinctly and overwhelmingly 5D: we experience sound dragged back and forth through time and context, the sampled voices calls from another space that makes little literal sense but feels right. And 'feel' is the operative response when coherence and the rational are so obviously disregarded. It's a very Sebadlian sense of the uncanny Son is channeling, not lost or even unmoored as such, but arranged just so to make the familiar askew and, yes, aslope...
