As you might expect from a guy who named his album Home, Jason Chung’s (aka Nosaj Thing) new record is deeply and immovably quiet. This kind of quiet has little to do with volume; after all, you don’t make songs for Kid Cudi and Kendrick Lamar unless you can put some mustard on the beat. The quiet at the heart of Nosaj’s music is in its energy. Home is focused, simple, and gorgeous.
The video for Home”s first single – insofar as a mainly-instrumental electronic album can have a single – was released in late November and features a combination of projection and live dancers. The dancers movements trigger a slew of geometric shapes, fragmenting into patterns that are both abstract and familiar: fireworks, or faces, or coordinated movement. This is what listening to Nosaj Thing is like: a mix of the arcane, the precise, and the completely human.
Chung’s first record – 2009′s much-heralded Drift – established him as a master of details. The perfectly-sculpted drums and mellifluous pads of Drift return on Home, and the young producer’s knack for creating worlds out of a few disparate elements has only grown stronger. Chung’s formula is tried and true, and even though the skittering-percussion-over-delicately-filtered-synthesizers trick shows up on every track it seems pointless to care. It never gets old.
Though hazy half-tempo hip-hop is all the rage these days, Chung’s liberal use of reverb and syncopated delays is intriguing rather than rote. “Tell” is airy, glitchy electronica; “Safe” is all fuzzy vibraphones and snapping hi-hats. Chung’s hip-hop teeth come out on “Snap”; “Try,” featuring the haunting and barren vocal work of Toro y Moi, seems to linger in the air for a long time. When a beautifully-played electric guitar surfaces on “Eclipse/Blue” surfaces it feels like dawn in Antarctica.
Still though Home is all evocative – yet delicate – surfaces; hundreds of planes connected in a breathing web. Every sixteen bars the listener arrives at another breathtaking (if spare) vista. Sit back and enjoy the view.
Bars: 5/5
Nosaj Thing – Safe
03 Safe
Nosaj thing – Snap
07 Snap
Nosaj Thing – Phase III
10 Phase III
Nosaj Thing – Try feat. Toro y Moi
09 Try feat. Toro y Moi
