Sustained by nihiti

NIHITI follows 2020’s A New Kind Of Weather’s exploration of darkly psychedelic song forms with Sustained, a suite of brooding electronic ambience designed to transport and decompress the listener. Commissioned for the first and second years of Aurora Halal and Zara Wladawsky’s ‘Sustain-Release’ festival – named ‘the best music festival on US soil today’ by Resident Advisor – the three longform tracks herein were composed to serve as an escape from the festival’s more high-octane dancefloor offerings.

In some sense this is functional salon music following a lineage that stretches from Erik Satie to William Basinski. Opener ‘Stellar Observer’ unfolds over 21 minutes (a single side of vinyl), centers around on two repeating pads that seem to recall the most elemental of movements – ebb & flow, inhale & exhale, sustain & release. Analog sonorities emerge in the periphery, threatening to burst forward but never doing so. Repetitive but also surprising.

On Side 2, ‘Tetrachrome’ displays a sumptuous digital noise in the mold of a blissed-out Blanck Mass/Fuck Buttons track or a hard-wired Fennesz – a wave of electronics and modulating distortion that teeters on the edge of abrasion. Elsewhere, ‘If The Color’ (co-produced with visual artist and musician Viktor Timofeev) gives us the record’s moodiest moments, with pitched-down vocal sample and snatches of speech over melancholic synths.

An ambient escape has since become a mainstay of Sustain-Release – the stage for which this music was written has become known as The Grove, which in recent years has seen performances from the likes of RAMZi, DJ Python and DJ Healthy (whose 2020 release At The Grove documents his set at the previous year’s festival).