Miles Egan
Nico Niquo conjures a mood that is somehow simultaneously tranquil and intensely aware and seems to float in a timeless space.
Favorite track: My Home In The Storm.
Nico Niquo’s ‘Esperanto’ sees the Australian artist return to Orange Milk Records six years since his album ‘In A Silent Way’, and on this new release, Nico builds upon the framework of his last two records for the label: still, ghostly Grime, retro-futurist synthesizer arpeggios, and flourishes of New Age ambiance.
As per Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Esperanto’, Nico’s own ‘Esperanto’ bears palpable influences from the incidental music and audio that surround us in the everyday, and attempts to bend them into something both tender and bizarre. ‘Epistrophy’ twists a sandbox baroque of jingles, alerts and notifications into a whirring cacophony of bells, synths and faux bird calls, whereas ‘My Home In The Storm’ takes the ‘Gliding Square’ synths of early Grime instrumentals and abstracts them into a serene rumination more akin to the earlier works of Arvo Pärt.
Across the record, tracks like ’Paper Peony’ and ‘Blue Ecco’ draw disparate, unusual threads together into patterns that don’t spell out something specific, but more so gesture towards something ineffable. Emile Frankel, writing for Disclaimer, posed that Nico’s music is ‘a grimoire to stillness, work that can make you feel both remote and motionless, and its companioned reverse: helium-ballooned, rising, incredible loveliness, dear and held …’ and it is the quiet, patient pursuit of these sentiments via Nico’s unusual means that typifies this record, too.
credits
released May 23, 2023
Music by Nico Callaghan
Mixed and Mastered by Joseph Buchan
Visual art by Ellen Thomas and Keith Rankin
the album that started my obsession, some of their finest work. solid base with vaporwave ideas compounded with that DDS touch and nice experimentation TurnsIntoWine
Oh her first full-length for One Little Indian, the classically trained pianist has her unique virtuosity on full display. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 1, 2018
There’s a quiet beauty to this remix album of compositions by Michael Vincent Waller, with contributions from JLin, Prefuse 73, & more. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 1, 2024