- Nisennenmondai have been around for 15-odd years, but for a growing section of their audience they're a recent discovery. The shift started in 2011, when the Japanese trio began to introduce a dance music influence into their noisy, kosmische-inspired rock. They've since taken the "do lots with little" credo to a masochistic extreme, focussing on just a handful of long, loopy songs—recorded on 2013's brilliant N, refined through their incendiary live show and re-recorded last year for the Japan-only N'. The risk of such extreme focus is that it turns into obsession, and the trio have begun turning to collaborators to keep things fresh. Last year, they worked on a live show and a pair of remixes with Shackleton. On #N/A they team up with another British artist, dub innovator Adrian Sherwood.
Sherwood has a destabilising influence on the band's sound. The album's taut, hypnotic grooves sing from the same hymn book as N, but, after a trip through Sherwood's mixing desk, they're strafed with erratic delays and layers of additional processing, their structures heaving between states. Sherwood's method is subtractive—risky when there's so little to begin with—and his interventions don't always match the apocalyptic intensity of Nisennenmondai on their own. Opener "#1" remains twitchy and tentative for the full ten minutes. On the even longer closing track, "#5," Sherwood whips rolling hi-hats into a satisfying fog, but holds off from any impactful moments.
#N/A gets bolder in the middle. "#3" veers into dank techno territory, and is crying out for extension—the obnoxious ascending tone at the beginning and end could be spun into a druggy epic all of its own. "#4" disrupts the album's fairly monotone pace, setting a speedy kick drum against patient bass tones. Sherwood is bolder with the FX, too, his rippling background textures making for the album's most psychedelic moment.
These short tracks hint at the more compact and engaging album #N/A could've been. But on "#2," the collaborators show they can also pull off long-form. This one has the clearest structure, with a motorik groove emerging steadily out of arid gusts of guitar noise. At the seven-minute mark, the dust clears for a hi-hat entry. Perhaps the bass throb that follows is Sherwood's contribution; it slides uneasily against the pulse, causing the drums to shear away again before reforming around it. From there, Sherwood's input gets increasingly wild. Just as you might have hoped, his muffled reverb detonations and sonar-like bleeps give a whole new dimension to Nisennenmondai's sound.
Tracklist01. #1
02. #2
03. #3
04. #4
05. #5