Cruel Nature Recordings – 23rd February 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Nnja Riot is the solo project of Lisa McKendrick, who also happens to be one half of experimental electronic noise duo Isn’tses, with Tim Drage, who makes serious noise as Cementemental.
It’s a small world, especially in circles of noise and experimental electronics, and so it is that a few years ago, I paired with Tim for a one-off collaborative set in London at the bottom of a bill curated by Human Worth, with the mighty Modern Technology headlining. I lost my hearing in one ear before the set due to some congestion, and by the end, I’d lost my voice, too. Somewhere along the way, I’m convinced I’ve crossed paths with Isn’tses, too, but can’t find the evidence at this moment in time.
Anyway, my needless digression brings me to the point of observation that their individual projects are quite different from one another, and their collaborative output. This is ultimately a good thing, because while algorithms which have seemingly replaced the music press in making recommendations of the ‘if you liked listening to this, you’ll like this’ ilk, it ain’t necessarily so. Because algorithms don’t understand art, or the fact that an artist’s output may be widely varied.
And so it is that as Nnja Riot, Lisa takes a much more songwriterly approach to things, and Violet Fields contains seven songs which can be described broadly as stark industrial electropop. ‘Horror Heart’ brings all of the elements in together to raise the curtains on the album: understated verses, with a thumping heartbeat bass beneath a delicate vocal bathed in reverb, are suddenly blown away in a wave of noise and monotone robotics with whipcracking synthetic snares cutting through the murk with some harsh treble.
‘The Evolve’ is a low, slow, dark pulsating grind which swells to a blistering ruckus of bubbling, broiling eruption of glitching electronic froth, and things get mangled fast and hard. Nnja Riot is indeed an appropriate moniker: the noise grows and takes over by stealth, as if from nowhere: one minute things are pretty mellow, the next, it’s all going off and you’re being carried away on a sonic tidal wave.
The album’s longest track, ‘Dark Assassination’, stretches beyond the seven-minute mark, and with a stuttering, beat hammering like a palpating heart in a state of fibrillation against the ribcage, it’s creates a muscle-tightening tension which is uncomfortable. The vocals are disconcerting, sounding as they do detached, off-key, non-melodic. Desperate drones bend and warp in the background, adding layers of dissonance and discomfort.
Everywhere across Violet Fields, there are subtle but essential incidental details, little lines of melody which ripple and fade. The title track is hazy, sedated, spaced-out, with melodic elements juxtaposed with swerving sci-fi noise which threatens to drown out the erratic beats and she cuts loose to another level of intensity with the vocal delivery: fuzzed with distortion, there’s a outflowing from the innermost which pours into the swirling wash of multi-faceted noise.
Violet Fields crackles and fizzes, often promising structures which crumble and evaporate and leave the listener feeling a little lost, grasping for something uncertain and just beyond reach. It’s this sense of vagueness which remains after the grainy ‘Musical Fix’ and the ephemeral drift of ‘Slow Release’, a mere fragment of a song which carries a spiritual richness on a ritual drumbeat before fading. There’s a sense that hearing Violet Fields and fully grasping it are not one and the same, and it feels that however long one spends engaging with it, there will always be depths and layers of implicit meaning that exist beyond the realms of conception. You wave a feeble hand, desperate to clutch and cling, but it’s gone. It’s gone.
AA
Aural Aggravation 