Bleep

Nik Colk Void has achieved an omnipresence in countless music scenes, with collaborations and bands dating back to the beginning of the millennium. With an unparalleled repertoire, she has established herself as an experimenter in the upper echelons in her over twenty year career, and that’s all without having released a solo album. 2022 is the year of Void’s debut, Bucked Up Space, and it’s an exceptional one at that.

Starting out in indie bands through the late 90s and 2000s, Void joined Factory Floor in 2010, adding her unique brand of manipulated vocals and guitars to their propulsive beats. Eventually noticed by Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, she dived even deeper into a dark, volatile sound on the Carter Tutti Void project, before collaborating with Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg for their 2018 album as NPVR. Rehberg guided Mego’s untouchable legacy, and set the ball rolling for Void to release her own electrifying solo record, a culmination of the connections she forged in her history as an artist.

Recorded in collaboration with Rehberg, Bucked Up Space was inspired in large part by the vibrational feeling she has experienced performing live in clubs and galleries in the UK and around the world. The audience acted as a sounding board to Void’s insatiable desire for artistic alliance, as she teased out ideas and responded to the crowd’s reactions, fermenting the sonic alchemy that Bucked Up Space revels in. Void built the album up like a puzzle, slowly piecing together improvisational demos collected diaristically over time at her home studio. The end result is a strong collection that’s as much self-actualisation as it is dance music: Void discovered herself in the live conversations between artist and audience, and hopes the listener walks away with music that makes them feel alive.

The pummelling rhythms of highly kinetic ‘Interruption Is Good’ are an indicator of that high octane live energy. Its kicks make the dancefloor rumble and the speaker cones rattle while mirage-like sirens wriggle throughout. Synths that sound like they could be an acid bassline come out of leftfield, channelling an out of body experience that is echoed in Russell Haswell’s minimal and ominous remix. It’s reminiscent of the album cover, a film still of a sculpture by Maria De Lima entitled “We Are City”. The enigmatic image perhaps depicts the ripples in the fabric of spacetime that the music creates, but only shows one side to the story: the video for ‘Interruption Is Good’ features the scene in motion, with a head scratching orbit panning around this structure that doesn’t seem to abide the laws of physics, forming the “distorted reality” that the sounds on Bucked Up Space come from.

‘Big Breather’ expands this abstracted feeling, its trickling beats and sharp synths strike like lightning, echoing into the warped spacetime. All of these sounds imply a techno origin, yet Void never adheres to the rules of any genre, opting for tracks that are instinctively danceable but just beyond the reach of familiarity. The curious lo-fi vignettes bracketing these alien jams add to this feeling, with glimpses of a beat clunking throughout ‘Tender Supposition’ until broken apart by the invigorating tesla coil rhythms of ‘Demna’, subtly morphing and drumming on the mind.

Learning that many sounds are actually created through extended guitar techniques makes this album a puzzle of reverse engineering. Trying to figure out how Nik Colk Void made the heavily distorted scrapes in the energising closer ‘Oversized’ will probably prove an impossible feat, which is part of what makes Bucked Up Space one of the most intriguing experimental techno records of the year.