Greg Nieuwsma
by Mat Smith
US-born, Krakow-based musician Greg Nieuwsma’s last album, Travel Log Radio, seemed to perfectly embody the disquieting feeling of early lockdown. Assembled from field recordings made in locations around the world, Travel Log Radio showed how suddenly things that we had taken for granted (perhaps) – the ability to freely go wherever you want in the world and the satiability of wanderlust that freedom of movement allowed – had been taken away from us. It was a haunting, uncomfortable listen in some ways; poignant and wistful in others.
Rabbit Hole Variations, Nieuwsma’s new album, is no less haunting and uncomfortable, only in a completely different way. “The backstory is that one of my Twitter friends turned me on to Coltrane changes harmonic structures,” he told me. "That led me down a rabbit hole. While down that rabbit hole, I encountered another – generative music. To these I added a bit of this and a dash of that, and I spent the early lockdown mixing it all together.”
The effect is like tumbling, Alice-style, into a strange, lysergic, dream-like world, somewhere between David Lynch and The Residents circa Commercial Album. The pieces are arranged like a single, seamless whole, each one taking on its own episodic quality that’s as similar to the next piece as it is different. There is a feeling of being slightly out of sync, though with what is unclear – Coltrane’s approach to altering the chords of his interpretations of standards, for example, still ultimately anchored the listener to the original piece; with generative music, it’s often unclear precisely which path a piece will take, making Nieuwsma’s concatenation of both theories a strange, yet rewarding listen.
The album’s eight pieces are titled in such a way as to form a short verse – ‘take steps into the garden of respite, near the moon hills, where restless balloon animals float in circles that can only be squared, unwittingly, by butterflies whose wings are yet to be unfurled’. Taken as a whole, the tracks flow between the see-sawing melodies of ‘Unwittingly’ to the near-whimsical ‘In Circles That Can Only be Squared’. which sounds like it was fashioned from degraded Optigan loops. Elsewhere, ‘Into The Garden Of Respite’ has a meditative, pastoral quality that sounds like slightly surreal folk music while ‘Unfurled’ is a moment of unquestionable beauty.
‘Where Restless Balloon Animals Float’ and ‘Take Steps’ are among the most sonically challenging tracks, both, in their own way, feeling like a trip to a freaky amusement park while rapidly losing your grip on reality. ‘Take Steps’ uses fragments of carousel music to create a blurry, disorienting atmosphere, while ‘Where Restless Balloon Animals Float’ slowly uncoils, almost like looking depairingly at your sagging reflection in a hall of mirrors.
This is loop-based music forced where those loops don’t want to go, sounding skewed and wonky and vaguely uncomfortable. By the end, you no longer know which way is up and which way is down, whether you’ve listened to the album over and over or are still on your first play. It sidesteps the traditional trappings of self-generating music by having a distinctive personality all of its own rather than becoming ambient wallpaper. In so doing, it is maximalist where Travel Log Radio was beyond minimalist, and just the kind of thought-provoking, head-decluttering music you need as you contemplate another six months of restrictions.
Rabbit Hole Variations by Greg Nieuwsma is released September 25 2020 by Wormhole World.