Nicolas Bougaïeff – Listen to a new track, Nexus, taken from the forthcoming album on Mute – out 24 July 2020

On June 10, 2020

In News

NICOLAS BOUGAÏEFFLISTEN TO HIS NEW TRACK,

FROM THE FORTHCOMING ALBUM,

THE UPWARD SPIRAL

Nicolas Bougaïeff has shared a new track, the latest to be taken from his forthcoming album, The Upward Spiral – out on vinyl and digitally on 24 July 2020.

Listen to the creeping mutation of ‘Nexus’, where gabber, IDM and drum ‘n’ bass collide, here.

The track is described by the Berlin-based producer and artist, as “a crossroads from the old world to the new world…” He goes to explain that it’s a crossroad from the meaningless to the meaningful and from the personal to the collective, and that “the meaning I’m looking for is optimism and commitment and collaboration”.On the new album, Bougaïeff reframes familiar tropes for his own mind-expanding vision of body music. Punishing industrial techno charges the album at surface level with beautiful-meets-bleak energy. But peel back the layers of brash ferocity, and there’s a hell of a lot more going on than first meets the ear.

The culmination of years of hard work, Bougaïeff grew the album from the seeds of a bespoke composition technique; a carefully thought-out studio experiment in how to bend a love of techno into innovative new shapes. Across nine metallic misadventures, which Bougaïeff describes as “little open scores”, he blitzes drum patterns and sharp synthwork into a satisfyingly effective blend. Intricate rhythmic structures lurk beneath the “strawberry jam” of the surface aesthetics. This rhythmic illusion seeps into every crevice of a record that brings a slice of academia to the rave. This new album continues his decades-long love of club music, a love that has compelled Bougaïeff to challenge conventional wisdom, delivering genre-busting Berghain sets that expertly blend French-Canadian hip-hop with Tchaikovsky, moody techno and ambient.

Previous releases include the Cognitive Resonance EP that relaunched the NovaMute imprint in 2017.