3 out of 5

Label: Planet Mu

Produced by: Tatiana Triplin

We could dive deep on theories as to what the underscore after Nondi_’s name “means;” possibly it’s something derived from Tatiana Triplin’s – Nondi_’s – experience running a netlabel, or her ties to footwork and other underground electro subgenres – some kind of symbolism I’m just not hep enough to understand. Possibly it means nothing.

For her followup album on Planet Mu, after the two-years-prior Flood City Trax, swapping out that underscore for ellipses does feel purposeful. The music on Nondi… is symbolic of ruminations; of trailing off mid-sentence. From the bandcamp copy, the tunes, for Tatiana, are meant “to capture the sense of freedom I used to get … when I was first discovering (music)” – and that’s in those ellipses as well. It’s open-ended, but also zeroed in, diving deep into a discovery; an obsession.

But open-endedness doesn’t exactly equate to the music being inviting. Rather, the restless “jukes” of Flood City are swapped for almost slavish repetition, drilled-in repetitions of certain samples and sounds. Beatless trills; some ambient static. Bursts of drums and energy come through – single Tree Festival; Broken Future 175 – but it’s as though Triplin is uninterested in fleshing those out beyond the fascination of the burst. Her discovery process revels not in minutiae, but in sound itself. Sometimes that can / does involve minutiae, when the looped beats ripple with extras, layering on top of one another, such as on I Version Melody, one of the album’s noisiest and best tracks; but often it’s just… sound. Not atonal; not walls of it; just sound that connects with Nondi_ in that moment, and that she lets ride on repeat for 2, 3, 4 minutes at a time. As this gets blended with occasional more formal moments, a “story” emerges, but that’s pretty open-ended too, just staring at the stars, absorbing the feeling.

The album’s pretty insular in that regard. I get people connecting with this, but I find it fairly impenetrable on the whole, though I appreciate the approach, and the music has enough highlights – and is certainly interesting enough – to merit listening. Toward the album’s end, the Nondi_ we knew from Flood City returns – shuffling, restless, shifting beats – as kind of a farewell thanks for visiting, but it’s not exactly a goodbye that suggests you need to visit again soon.

This makes sense as a stepping stone towards something else; I hope Tatiana sticks with the Nondi_ name for long enough that we get to see that something else.

(As a side note, my head canon has me understanding why Mike Paradinas collected Bonus Nondi_ based on this album: it shows off the range of which Tatiana is capable, as a kind of acknowledgement that this set may not be exactly what Flood City fans were expecting. It’s a scattered listen, but does provide a “bridge” of sorts to this album for me.)