4 out of 5

Label: Planet Mu

Produced by: Nondi_

A woozy, restless ode to a time and place. As per the artist: “Flood City Trax is music that captures the mood of living in a town like (Johnstown, Pennsylvania), and more broadly the isolation of poverty,” with the title making reference to multiple floods in the area, apparently leaving it as something of a continually crumbling place to live. And that’s all very much felt in the music, with a haze of static – distant sounds, fuzzed up – lain over Nondi_’s shuffling beats, and a muffled low-end that instead favors a top layer of busy, wandering notes. Even the track names support this: Euphonic Daydream; Nostalgic Vision…

There are several songs which mention the style of ‘juke,’ further evoking the shuffling, underground nature of these tunes, but the work on ‘Flood City Trax’ is much denser than I’d generally associate with that term, and puts the music in a truly original spot between being beautiful and anxiety-ridden, forever changing as you try to get ahold of it; frantically searching for a memory, and obsessing over the little snippets that are remembered . The album only finally seems to rest during its final song: Harmoyear, something of a lullabye, but degraded and fading.

Somewhere in the album’s middle, Nondi_ starts to step out from this cloudy miasma of percolating, bottomless beats and sprinkled keys, testing out some elements which nip from some 00s-era Rephlex works, with a bit of glitchy Aphex thrown in here, or some harder-edged electro. These tunes unsteady the theme slightly, but could be read as growing pains if you’re listening to the album as a story – an unseen “narrator” trying on different guises to escape their hometown. In the moment, though, I think these tunes unsettle Flood City’s spell a bit, and don’t exactly map to Nondi_’s style of allowing music to drift in and out. As an entire experience, though, it all works – pulling you in and keeping you at a bit of a remove, with the artist never letting themselves rest on a predictable beat or rhythm, though also able to smooth out the album – in general – to be a cohesive, if fitful, listen.