Hailing from Strasboug, a city placed near the France-Germany border, Nunu is part of a rising collection of young European producers quickly reimagining how club music can and will exist on the Continent and its relationship to the regional forms it has so often been informed by in the past. The days of daft Bmore and footwork attempts, while not a thing of the past, have certainly been surpassed by a new approach, one that prides decentralization, equal amounts of an almost naive experimentalism and pop adoration, and a flair for performance rarely found in DJ communities. On July 1, Nunu will release the Mind Body Dialogue EP on our own Astral Plane Recordings outfit, his official debut and the most coherent and complete example of his artistic vision to date, drawing on a rich and often confused lineage of AI and cyborg representation in popular culture to imagine intimacy, love and sex within, outside of and between humans and machines. Its six songs are at times brutal, but also with a carefully constructed internal beauty, bore out in between frenzied percussion and an almost minimalist approach to composition. It’s visceral music intended for the club with an intensive narrative background that can be felt in the harsh, alien worlds of tracks like “Punani” and “Hateful” but hardly infringes on its immediate, tactile effect in physical space.
A recent mix for Endgame’s Precious Metals NTS show put the French artist’s work in line with artists like Lotic, Why Be and Exit Sense and showed off his willingness to embrace hysteria, its near-30 minute run time comprised of chasmic sub bass, whirlwind percussion and, if anything, an abiding sense of chaos. His Astral Plane mix functions on a different level, exposing the sneaky beauty mentioned above and the delicate nature of tracks like “Mind Body Dialogue” and “Cog” (which closes out the mix). This time, its v1984, Mechatok and Miley Serious that provide the context, producers that pride melodics more than the aforementioned group, but approach their pop-leaning work from anything but a traditional angle, whether it’s in the grotesque Arca-esque realm or more in the twisted Metro Boomin school of thought. The sound is at times angelic, especially when Sega Bodega’s “Sun Loop (Angel Mix)” peaks halfway through the mix, but there’s always an edge there, always something sinister and discomfiting about the overt display of affection. Check out “Punani” from Mind Body Dialogue over at THUMP and look out for the full release on July 1.
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