Browse by Artist: NIKAKOI

Artist:	NIKAKOI
Title:	Requiem For Deranged Robot
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	LI 013CD

Tbilisi, Georgia-based electronic composer Nika Machaidze aka Nikakoi presents an album for Laboratory Instinct that couldn't be more different from the contorted electro, breakbeat hyper-jazz and post-modern pop of his previous releases or from his work as Erast. Stretched across two discs, sketched in brief or in tracks running from 17 and 18 minutes, Requiem For Deranged Robot is a collection of electro-acoustic compositions and ambient mood-pieces of unusual beauty and immersive power. Drawing from influences like Erik Satie, Raymond Scott, Brian Eno and Pete Namlook, Nikakoi's music is muted and slow-moving, running piano and strings through batteries of effects, until the music feels like a dub of a dub of a dub, bruised and abraded; tiny electronic tendrils flick about the peripheries. (Much of the album feels like the lost soundtrack to a classic art-house film, which makes sense: Machaidze was trained as an animator and director of feature films.) But as strangely soothing as the music is, with its aura rippling like lake water under the new moon, it's also complex stuff. Partly programmed and partly improvised, the music reflects the spontaneous nature of its creation, evolving as if by some organic process. And ironically, the music's richness belies its lo-fi origins: many sounds come straight from the on-board speakers of a cheap Yamaha synthesizer, recorded via microphone into the computer. Machaidze made particular use of the "slice" function in Fruity Loops as a means of altering structure and texture. The title comes from a documentary film that Machaidze was watching at the time of making this album; the plot concerned the deconstruction of a U.S. Navy fighter jet into constituent parts utilized in every day consumer electronics -- cell phones, CD players, microwave ovens, computers, all of them related in their electrical DNA to mammoth killing machines. The "Ghost Files" of CD2 are meant as a kind of homage to the "ghost files" left deep in the memory of the deranged, disarranged robot -- half toaster, half fighter. It should be no surprise that such a critique of consumer capitalism and the military-industrial complex might come out of a former Soviet Republic. The only surprise is how tender the final result turns out to be. Requiem For Deranged Robot is a gorgeous, mysterious, generous and all-embracing work.

Artist:	NIKAKOI
Title:	Selected
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	LI 014CD

Selected draws upon Tbilisi, Georgia-based Nikakoi's first two albums, but it's not a complete reissue. Instead, Nika Machaidze aka Nikakoi has gathered nine tracks from Sestrichka, 11 from Sentimental and 10 all-new recordings. All 30 tracks have been completely re-sequenced, shuffling old with new to create a hybrid album that's far more than the sum of its parts. Over two and a quarter hours long, Selected is a treasure trove, amazingly rich and varied, of almost cinematic proportions. Appropriately for an artist who also directs and edits film and video, on Selected the forces of chance and sentiment play out in a widescreen panorama of chaos-skirting rhythms and heartstring-tugging melodies. There are ample traces of '90s electronica and IDM in Nikakoi's skittering rhythms and melancholic refrains, but it's not mere redux. Tracks like "Krasnagorsky Dream" and "PP" treat the styles established early in their careers by Aphex Twin and Autechre as a kind of folk idiom with infinite potential... rather than bound by the anxiety of influence, they're bursting with innocence and, yes, sincerity. There are moments of unbridled rhythmic and textural experimentation, like the new "HACPYBYXO," which somehow manages to sound soothing despite its punishing, quadruple-time arpeggios. Dub enters the picture on tracks like "Undine 2" and "Minimsss 3," which recall the fluid grooves and expansive sonics of artists like Pole and Burnt Friedman. Tweaked breakbeats and lounge instrumentation drive the '60s-inspired "Surup," while "Cverty 2 For May" is a slow-mo take on minimal techno at its most velvety. And finally, there are the many moments of understated electronic-pop genius: "Tin Soldier For Nika Ono," "City Lights [Tutta 2]," "Petja," "Sentimental" and "Nishan3test," all of them bittersweet and starry-eyed, teenage dreams burnished by the years to a dull shine. Nikakoi is truly a softy at heart, but his music is as complex as any human emotion: both sentimental and sedimentary, Selected is like an architectural survey for a planet where the soil itself is composed of microscopic fragments of memory.

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