Nika Son
Drift
BELGIUM / HOLLAND FUTURA RESISTENZA RESLP028 (2024)
Nika Son is a latterday musique concrète composer based in Hamburg, where she also works in visual arts and DJs on the side. Like many nowadays, she works with tapes and field recordings and transforms them, but also adds synths, voice elements, and whatever foreign bodies come to hand.
Her LP Drift attempts to depict, or evoke, a journey across water, but it’s also intimately connected with the film and installation work of Helena Wittmann. She made the film of Drift for which this LP also functions as a soundtrack. But there was also an installation piece Wildness Of Waves, on which both creators worked, and it was a video-audio work that might have provided solace to a culture-hungry audience, many of whom probably felt overwhelmed by the state of the world and welcomed any metaphor that would relieve the sense of being drowned. Recognisable blue ocean waves appear on the cover to this LP, but they turn into abstract art very quickly – perhaps the lack of a horizon line contributes to that effect – and the sound on the grooves likewise sails into the uncharted stretches of non-specific audio experience, as surely as if the rudder were fixed on that destination.
Though understated and hovering on the edges of perception, there’s still a core of content on Drift that won’t be dismissed very easily. The record divides neatly into two sides, corresponding to Day and Night; very precise latitude and longitude signs are posted instead of track titles. But where Chris Watson liked to nail down his wildlife and environment recordings to a specific place and time, Drift tends more towards sublimation. The prose-poetry of Theresa George on the insert – “when a child is born, it gets an octopus twin somewhere in the ocean”, and other such observations – muses on real and imagined aspects of the maritime experience, and adds another layer of impressionistic haze to this release. (09/05/2024)