Oh sure, it looks so much more exotic backwards, so Nosaj is simply Jason? This is funny but it removes part of the mystery,…well almost, the music is still really crazy mysterious for me. Nosaj Thing was doing his thing at the KXSC fest on Saturday, arriving with his mac and his,… whatever mix table he used, and he played his vibrating layered textures of electronica for some suspended time.
I was very close and the vibrations were intense, ticking every part of the body, and I am just realizing how inadequate my vocabulary is at describing this noisy and endless musical modulations sprinkled with experimental beats and distorted voices.
Nosaj sure looked busy, not even looking at the crowd, way too occupied; it was an intense business, like a one-man symphony of the future for the ecstasy generation. The stuff was not even dancey, rather unpredictable and going from a hard trance to the weirdest glitch noises, and as I was looking around me, I was seeing this air of bliss or stupor on every people’s faces.
From start to finish, I didn’t understand what was going on, how was he managing to produce all these hashed-mash-up of abstraction sometimes interrupted by some brief hip-hop or rap samples? Nosaj’s music was physically wrapping his audience, as all these intense vibrations were running along bodies, brushing everyone from neck to toe.
As he was not stopping or breathing (he may as well have been a robot), I was looking for some kind of direction in these… songs, do you call them songs? I guess he played some tracks off his 2009 debut album, 'Drift', and some live improvisation? I would not have been able to tell the difference, almost drugged out by this hallucinogenic soundscapes vaguely habited by some rare ghostly human voices.
I still feel foreign to this tweaking and knob-turning business, it always leaves a cold taste in my brain, it is too dense and too fluid to process, and the guy looked so much in control! After a few minutes, I got lost in his electronic pulsating maze of Doppler effects… oh but wait, may be it was his intention when he called his album ‘Drift’