- Nina and Good News are two Hamburg DJs associated with the city's Golden Pudel club. Their mixes mine a familiar vein of disquieting, avant-industrial atmospheres, but they're shot through with acoustic material. As Raime recently mentioned, if you hear the sound of, say, a real drum kit, you're aware of the person behind it and the space in which it's recorded. You get this feeling in Nina and Good News's selections, and it's what sets them apart from the hordes of DJs peddling morose industrial sounds. Their label, V I S, embodies this, too, especially this new release from Scheich In China.
Both sides of Scheich In China take you inside the circuitry of synthesisers, whose internal world of current and voltage assumes the guise of a natural environment. As such, it doesn't much care for catering to tastes and expectations, but a sense of human presence looms large in the background. The development of the three tunes on the A-side lands somewhere between oppressive and transcendent, or deliberate and accidental.
On the A1, a slight opening of a filter or a temporary change in key signals a major moment among the fuggy drones. A lone tom attempts to poke its head above the swampy surface, but most sounds are smushed into the same frequency band, vying for room where there is none. The A3 provides rare forward propulsion in the form of an imbalanced drum track, sounding like some filth crawling out of a wet ditch, but the B-side is clearly the pick of the set. Field recordings provide a natural environment of rain and passing traffic, but your perception is thrown off as line noise and synth textures blur the lines between real-world and machine ambience. Slo-mo death metal guitar marks time atop footsteps crunching along a path, but by the time all 18 minutes have elapsed, these snapshots of activity make way for a more general sense of unease.
TracklistA1 Untitled
A2 Untitled
A3 Untitled
B1 Untitled