Naw

The long awaited debut full-length by Naw, aka Neil Wiernik, offers dark and murky techno saturated in shadowy sounds yet dominated by powerful 4/4 rhythms. Naw embraces a uniquely low-end approach to his music, as opposed to the more common antiseptic crispness championed by the likes of Hawtin, or any Force Inc. artist. The result is a fertile psychological sonic landscape that's rich in overtone and suggestion, hinting at myriad possibilities. "I wanted it to sound equally organic and synthetic," he says. "I created all the sounds using synthetic tools and dumped them into samplers to play back. I treated each sound as if it were an actual instrument, bending them like bass strings or striking them like piano keys." The Resound... opens with "Brittle Sticks," a composition where tech-house beats are coupled with dreamy conversational narratives that give way to all sorts eerie and ambiguous noises that sound quite un-electronic. The impression of this track, and the entire album for that matter, is that of walking through a forest, or a remote part of a city, before light during a dense fog amidst mysterious noises where the listener strains his/her hearing to decipher what is going on. This creates something of a Blair Witch effect, where the hints of sounds lend more to the imagination than anything overt. "I was living in the middle of one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods at the time, and that is one thing you hear in the record - environmental decay. There is something very beautiful and wonderful about something that is slowly decaying and falling apart. When doing this record, it was the idea of trying to capture the feeling of decay in a synthetic world." Another unique quality of Naw's approach is the indeterminate feel, time-wise, of the music. It is generally easy to identify what era an electronic tune is from by the gear used, yet apart from the beats or the occasional house music keyboard sweep, it is difficult to pin down an era, thus creating a mystique. The Resound of a Foggy Autumn Dawn is a unique house/techno music experience from both a dance and cerebral perspective.