Boundary-pushing European mysterion
Who They?
We don’t know! All we have to go on is that Nui Blanc is the alias of a reclusive male Portuguese electronic producer. He released his first single, ‘Broken’, in 2017 and made his live debut in London last November as part of a Perth Records party.
Why Nui Blanc?
Nui Blanc says that he is drawn to music that is “polyphonic, unstable and expanded”, a mantra that runs through the small number of tracks he has in circulation today. He talks of a desire to push himself and his listeners out of their comfort zones, meaning that tracks like ‘Broken’ take the form of restless and disparate ideas, those juxtapositions creating an undulating flow that never quite goes where you expect it to. Watch a teenager flicking frantically between apps on an iPhone and you’ll get relatively close to the slightly nausea-inducing energy that Nui Blanc’s music has.
Tell Us More…
His new ‘Strata’ EP takes that ethos, but gives it structure and coherence. Beats that are distantly related to hip hop and R&B combine together with machine-processed vocals on ‘Under’ to create a stately, emotional grace, only for buzzing post-industrial drones and discordant bells to throw you off. The same happens on ‘Real’, where angry rave stabs and riffs suddenly displace an otherwise calm sentiment. The EP’s standout track, ‘Viscus’, kicks off with clattering percussion and randomised glitches before opening out into a dense electro-symphonic soundworld that belongs on a soundtrack to a documentary about cryptocurrency gangsters and data ransom.
The ‘Strata’ EP is out on Perth
