Hiro Kone aka Nicky Mao has the instinct for texture and shape of a metallurgist or a milliner, coaxing a specificity of acoustic geometry out of unforeseen materials, crafting tracks that are as sculptural as they are effervescent, brittle and psychic.
In electronic music in general and modular synthesis in particular, the possibilities are theoretically endless. But only in truly adroit hands are the possibilities palpable and material, not merely an intimation or promise of the form. Hiro Kone aka Nicky Mao has the instinct for texture and shape of a metallurgist or a milliner, coaxing a specificity of acoustic geometry out of unforeseen materials, crafting tracks that are as sculptural as they are effervescent, brittle and psychic.
Sandpapery drones of synthesis coexist with exploratory swells of orchestra, often ghostly; the first track gives you the impression of the departed trying to break back through the veil, communicating in gossamer sighs and the unstable vibrations of strings.
Some of it is cinematically tense, a simmering rumble of bass and occasional tachycardia of drum rising towards an abstract or foiled climax. The music shifts emotional and physical strata effortlessly, morphing happening so regularly and with such editorial precision, it’s like watching alien terrain glide by idly on a high-speed train towards some uncertain and distant conclusion.
Songs like “Nomad” use all the sonic and emotional charge of voice to near ceremonial importance. “Nomad dwell spring sulk iron-clad into dirt, into rust.” It is a tone poem, an abstraction of feeling that arrives somehow more removed from conscious understanding by its invocation of concrete language that remains just barely left of a literal interpretation. The way the almost-familiar is more alien then the totally bizarre, instrumental and structural familiarity is sown in along the hems to make the final tapestry that much more unusual.
Other movements have you deceptively sure of their essential melancholy, before a trickling counterpoint of hope climbs one uncertain note to the next out of the bog. The title track is like a prelude to war, or a disembodied microphone traveling through and capturing a fleeting impression of the aftermath of some civilization-altering tragedy, the structure of familiar dance music arriving as quickly as it vanishes, letting the echoing voices calling from the mist say their peace, call out to whatever it is they are trying to reach across the field of battle. What begins sere and bright is often molded into something darker so slowly it might escape perception. Rusty industrial beams, like cybernetic souls reaching out to each other for comfort across severed telecommunication lines. The effect is near permanent emotional flux.
The closer, “Malady of duration,” just barely intimates hopeful or conclusive logic, but seems never to fully arrive there; a condition with which we are all familiar.
-Winston Mann
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