Review Summary: If "Fated" was an R&B album on methadone, this feels like the overdose.
Minimalist music, according to its chief purveyor Philip Glass (who, for the record, never liked the term), is characterized by its “extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments.” It’s fraught with tension and atmosphere, effectively trapping the listener in the world. The best minimalist music evokes vast landscapes, entire topographies filled with active living elements. The repetition of Glass and Reich formed the compositional basis for electronic music as a creative medium. But, like a child looking to make its own way in the world, electronic music has constantly strived to cast off this studied repetition and evocative structure. Big ticket EDM artists fill their instrumentals with so many bits and bobs you’d think it was baroque, and the more experimental ones (like Flying Lotus, Tim Hecker, and Andy Stott), seek to escape the form altogether, instead pushing further towards jazz and post-rock. But in the mist of this genrewide rejection of origin has always been Nosaj Thing. Nosaj Thing, born Jason Chung, has always trafficked in the type of repetitive, heady, and structurally “minimalist” electronica that wears its Glass and Reich influences proudly. And with “No Reality,” Chung retreats further into the form, bringing perhaps his headiest work to date.
“No Reality,” like any good EP, seems less like a B-sides tape (Chung’s last LP, “Fated,” is not even a year old) and more like a narrative progression. Anyone who’s familiar with Nosaj Thing’s oeuvre so far shouldn’t be shocked by the stuff he brings out here. But what makes “No Reality” compelling is how it takes many of “Fated”’s best elements and removes the pretext and build-up to them, leaving them hanging in a listless vacuum. ‘N R 5’ takes ‘Watch’’s ghostly chopped vocals and eerie basslines and leaves little else in the mix. ‘N R 3’ takes a jittery groove similar to ‘Erase’ and only really adds a roughly chopped vocal sample and some synth stabs (at least for the 45 seconds at the end). All the tracks on “No Reality” have deep roots in parts of both “Home” and “Fated,” but there’s a distinctly unsettling amount of space on “No Reality” that makes it oddly compelling.
I’d be remise if I didn’t talk about the accompanying online experience. On NosajThing.com, you can find a cool digital experience where you can play with the sounds and watch a cool visualizer for the music. It’s a fun little waste of time, but it doesn’t add too much to the music. And with music this minimal, the visuals only remove a bit of the mystery of the music and make it feel less like an exercise in minimal progression and more like an unfinished work desperately seeking companionship in other mediums.
In Tao Lin’s “Taipei,” there’s an oft-repeated sentiment by Paul, the main character, about feeling tense, vulnerable, and numb all at the same time. Paul, an analogue for Lin himself, is almost entirely dependent on different drugs to maintain the illusion of sanity and evenhandedness. And as he spins out, growing increasingly desperate for connection, the numbness gives way to a growing anxiety. “Sleeping, waking,” he says in a frenzied high, the effects of overdose becoming evident. “Am I dead?” Lin’s work, characterized by the same isolated minimalism that colors Nosaj Thing’s output, provides a near-perfect way of characterizing this release. This EP, far from Nosaj Thing’s best work, ultimately feels like death. Not in its harshness or its brevity, but in its aloneness and its harrowing repetition and echoing undertones. “No Reality,” in its lonely repetition of the past and monochromatic descent into the deepest depths of its own atmosphere, feels like the antithesis of FlyLo's kaleidoscopic catalog of the aftermath. For Chung, the end of one's reality is simply a void, one that blurs the lines between waking and sleep. One that, ultimately, erases the reality that it emerges from. It's an empty end, but like laying in a warm puddle of mud, it feels comfortable.
