Bleep

It’s not often you get to work with your heroes, but on her debut album as Nondi_, Tatiana Triplin comes full circle to her admired Planet Mu with vibrant, lo-fi, and oneiric flavoured footwork beats warped through a hazy internet radio transmission. Taking the label’s legacy of bringing juke to the world with comps like Bangs & Works, Triplin runs the genre to its hypertactile, soakingly textured conclusion on Flood City Trax: a footwork fever dream made manifest.

Having released under numerous aliases on her label HRR, Triplin is no newcomer. She began producing sixteen years ago, steadily multiplying her personas and her output into increasingly prolific streams across Bandcamp and Soundcloud. From nightcore to vaporwave and everything in between, she has dabbled in a whole continuum of micro-genres, speaking to the last.fm generation that discovered club music online rather than on the dancefloor, and distorted it to fit the needs of the lightspeed information era.

Triplin eagerly participate in the recent digital culture as much as possible with her FRR label. In the decade since her debut as Yakui, her overflowing works tread completely new ground, landing her most prominent work yet as Nondi_. Flood City Trax shows her whizzing through sounds and styles pumping out some of this years best tunes.

The sounds of Chicago juke and Detroit techno are filtered through a digital upbringing on Flood City Trax, hammering through the album as they become slippery, sludgy, and vaporised. Triplin’s music education on imageboards, forums, and blogs is reflected in the bitcrushed palettes, while her leftfield club rhythms point towards Black artists’ unseverable influence on dance music as a whole. “Once I found out about Moodymann, I was blown away that Black people made this music” she comments. “Then I learned about Detroit techno and really got hooked on making club music.”

So much of instrumental dance music is based on political, environmental, or social themes, but on Flood City Trax, Nondi_ reaches into a history that is seldom acknowledged, and sonifies it perfectly. Johnstown, Pennsylvania has been the base of her operations for over twenty years, given its nickname due to the devastating floods of 1889 and 1977. The gentrification, exile, constant vigilance that arose from natural disaster results in an anxious yet hazy and fluid sound. “There hasn’t been a flood in like 50 years, but there’s always that feeling that the next one is going to come eventually”.

Light scatters across rippling waves on ‘FCD (Floaty Cloud Dream)’, with hi hats accelerating into a tear of rhythms crashing and plunging into the red, while synths float like flotsam and jetsam in the flood waters. Emergency sirens stutter in the chorus of claps on ‘Orchid Juke’, a glistening frenzy that breaks for the sludgy submerge of ‘Sun Juke’, with filtered percussion trudging through mud. Such is the power of Triplin’s sound design; whether tapping into hardcore with vocal snippets ripped to shreds, or blissing out to sunbleached spacey drips and blips, all of the songs feed into a soundworld evoking her hometown’s history.

A vitreous sheen glosses over the tracks’ abstracted rhythms, coruscating bells and mechanic stomps, coming to a close on ‘Harmoyear’. The celestial plucks of music box duet with throttling noise, singing in the distorted deluge. With its ethereal melody it is delicate yet destructive, a duality that runs deep throughout Flood City Trax, and makes Nondi_’s breakout album a highlight of 2023.