Kiran Sande, the shadowy figure pulling the strings behind London electronic outpost Blackest Ever Black, is one of those label bosses who can make a record sound essential through sheer turn of phrase. The debut release by Naaahhh comes with next to zero biographical information—just the promise that he, she, or they hail from “under London,” plus a found photo of a hippy raver, cross-legged and grinning on an Afghan rug, with a half-rolled joint laid out in front of her. Luckily, Sande’s liner-notes make up for some of the gaps in the narrative, promising “sidereal downers for all hardcore ravers” and “paranoid street music meets the cosmic disturbances of musique concrète, the MDMA spine-freeze of isolationism and England’s hidden reverse.” With a billing like that, it’s hard to resist.
It’s not that Naaahhh’s music struggles to live up to the accompanying prose, exactly. But Themes has you squinting into its depths in search of the promised ingredients, like a fortune-teller sifting through tea leaves. Here we have five tracks of murky ambience, devoid of anything you might recognize as a beat, but rhythmic nonetheless—an ooze of sound with dark, rippling tides mottling its surface. Casting around for antecedents, you might compare “Empty Rituals” to the more haunted and abstract works of Coil or Nurse With Wound, veteran British industrial units for whom sound was a carrier for occult or spiritual currents; or “Neck Devour” to the blasted, Gristle-y dub of Wolf Eyes circa Dead Hills.
True to Sande’s description, though, there are unmistakable traces of UK rave culture buried in Themes’ fabric. The throbbing, faintly seasick synth washes of “Blooz” imagine some ancient jungle or hardcore 12” with the beats and bass peeled away, leaving just floating, faintly toxic atmosphere. “My Theme” and “Theme 2,” meanwhile, could be club music as viewed from the “Stranger Things” alternate dimension of Upside Down. Muffled rhythms pulse interminably, gooey bass notes affect a dismal plod, and high quavering melody lines ghost around in the higher registers—a grotesque parody of rave’s ecstatic euphoria.
Over and out in 28 minutes, Themes draws to a close before your first impressions have quite had time to coalesce. This is neither uncommon nor necessarily unwelcome for a label that deals in the cryptic. But there is the sense that this is a project still finding its form. Whether Naaahhh follows on the heels of former Blackest Ever Black groups like Dalhous and Raime in blossoming into something dimly beautiful, or Themes remains a one-off emission from the dark side, remains to be seen.
