National Park System – A Visitor’s Guide (LBL004)
National Park System, the solo project of Princeton-educated programming prodigy Nicholas Yu, is a dark and gristly blend of club room beats, voluptuous drones, Arabesque flourishes, and noise tantrums. For his first physical release, comically dubbed A Visitor’s Guide, this San Francisco enigma taps a granular synthesis program that he designed with his own two cerebral hemispheres (see “Sad and Fucked (Not Moving)”, and what appears to be a patchwork of live drums, programmed beats, guitar, and violin.- Altered Zones, 3/2/2011
A seeming newcomer to the San Francisco electronic music landscape, National Park System is Bay Area resident Nicholas Yu, a producer of interstellar atmospheres, moody beatscapes, and the occasional leftfield pop hook. On his latest short-format release, A Visitor’s Guide (pictured above), Yu offers four songs that highlight each of his stylistic strong points—sometimes all at once. “Silver Miner” melds together heavy industrial rhythms with brooding synth washes, audio snippets from otherworldly source material, and a hint of psychedelia. National Park System’s music explores an eclectic range of styles that interplay quite effortlessly, setting him apart from most of the other production work coming out of San Francisco lately. - XLR8R, (3/5/2011)
nihiti – other people’s memories (LBL002)
CMJ Top Add – 11/30/10 (#7)
CMJ Top 200 1/11/11-2/2/11 (#97, #120, #150, #124)
We weren’t sure what to think when we first laid our ears on this, but it’s quickly becoming a new favorite. Aquarius Records Featured Release, 1/20/2011
There’s not a lot on [nihiti’s] Other People’s Memories that sounds much like anything else currently happening, unless there’s some cadre of well-presented electroacoustic savants out there churning out music of this gloss and caliber. – Dusted Magazine/Still Single, 1/5/2011
nihiti… relies on the coexistence of electronic music with acoustic instruments to create a sound that is alternately tense, foreboding, and intricate in the most intriguing ways. [It] can get excessively dark, as well as ferociously danceable within a single pendulum swing… A cerebral effort in line with This Heat, late-period Talk Talk, Gastr del Sol, and other heavy hitters of recent decades, and a group that is worth the considerable effort to investigate. – Other Music Featured Pick, 1/4/2011
Song structures weave from straight up danceable near-goth anthems, to completely disassembled and almost entirely heartbreaking ambient pieces… completely disassembling the structural elements of [these] seemingly paint-by-numbers pseudo-genres and very, very genuinely and very, very creatively forcing something new to exist. – Insound.com Record of the Week, 11/1/2010
Time doesn’t exist in realms that nihiti crawls… It spans everything sinister, no matter its assigned genre. – Altered Zones, 11/9/2010
nihiti’s album, other people’s memories is a luxurious excursion across dazzling dreamscapes, an amalgam of progressive rock, non poh faced IDM, and playful experimentalism which make you feel like you were somewhere else without being in between places, it must be the stickiness of that bass rumbling like Deerhunter in some seriously abstract trip. – 20jazzfunkgreats.co.uk, 9/10/10
The music is evocative and reminiscent of Krautrock bands for its interest in evoking human emotion through manipulations in sound rather than using lyrics or other classic forms to convey meaning. – Venus Zine (5/5 stars), 10/10/10
Der experimentierfreudige New Yorker Nihiti…; Stile und Instrumente unterbringt: von Elektronik, Ambient bis sogar Arcade Fire ähnlichen Piano-Pop-Songs, wie “The Ringing In (The Sun Is Rung)“. – iamnosuperman.com 11/9/2010
More writeups:
nihiti will keep your headphones on. - Impose
It’s pretty easy to get caught up in what Nihiti have created on Other People’s Memories, their first full-length offering. For the most part, Nihiti deal in dark and moody instrumental pieces that flow into one another in an almost suite-like fashion. There is a bit of a split personality that plays out over the course of the album, with the A-side focused mostly on organic, piano-driven instrumentation and the flip side on more electronic, dance-oriented methods. … There’s a certain polish to Other People’s Memories that I’m normally quite averse to, but I can appreciate how fully realized this album is, which nowadays isn’t something you can say for most band’s first full-lengths. – Foxy Digitalis
Nihiti’s album Other People’s Memories drops October 5 on Lo Bit Landscapes. This band is still a mystery to me but the album is wonderful so stay up on that. – Get Off the Coast
nihiti are a somewhat elusive psychedelic noise project based in New York, with a clever knack for planning ahead. Though their forthcoming album doesn’t surface until October, they’ve already got a cd release party locked in for 10/10/10. We managed to get our hands on a pair of intriguing tracks from the LP, titled Other People’s Memories. Check out “Return of Kind Ropes” and “Black Cars” above for a taste of their avant-techno sound. – The Sky Report
nihiti’s “Black Cars (a Sinistra)” sounds like a gem that didn’t make the cut from the wonderfully abrasive new Chemical Brothers album Further. Not much is known about the New York artist, other than this track is really good. Also, fans of Fuck Buttons and Primal Scream should be able to dive in head first. – Surfing on Steam
Supposedly, Nihiti is a band from New York, whose name may or may not mean ‘love’ in Japanese and who make some clanging, apocalyptic indie rock. Supposedly. Their myspace page and official site are short on details but long on esoteric prattle and expressionist-y black and white pictures that may or may not be from their live shows. When Get Off the Coast talked up “The Ringing In (The Sun is Rung)” on Altered Zones last week, it was intimated that the song, though not fully representative of the band’s stylistic range, displays a sinisterly menace that’s central to Nihiti’s ethos. And I guess I can see a little bit of that here. There’s a loose, dogged quality to insistent drums and piano plinks, and the lyrics are certainly focused on the catastrophic: “Whole world’s quaking / my nation’s breaking / it’s a long way down…it’s all gonna be alright.” One of the clearest comparisons I can make is mid-career Modest Mouse. The in-room microphones capture a playfully pounding beat with vicious hi-hats that recall Jeremiah Green’s signature style (bands take note: more drums / drummers should sound like this) and the bark-y, melodically repetitive vocals also contain more than a shade of Isaac Brock. So even if there’s a hint of menace here and a grimy, scuffed sound that comes from the rawness of the recording, I’m not convinced it’s all that ‘sinister.’ Let’s forget for a second that, in an album-length context where they’re allowed to stretch out and wander a bit, Nihiti could certainly sound darker and remember the way that live drums, muted acoustic guitars, and pianos playing major chords tends to feel pretty honest and welcoming. I mean, am I crazy for hearing some kind of slinky joy in this groove? It seems to me that the likable thing about “Ringing”—what makes it catchy and memorable—is that it sounds like a band enjoying playing music together, even if the artistic intent is far less pleasant. That’s a big reason I like the Modest Mouse comparison here. Both bands have (or have had at points) a way of straddling a written mood and a musical energy so that the two don’t have to be congruent for you to understand it or dig what they’re doing. - Popcorn Noises
We dig the sound of Nihiti, who create complex soundscapes that skirt between acoustic homilies to the screaming fields of sonic death that plumb the same worlds as bands like Fuck Buttons and Merzbow. Check out their single, Return of Kind Ropes, below. – Lost At E Minor