buy vinyl/digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

taken from Hantu 'Zither EP' NM056

Nice Music presents the debut solo recording from ethnomusicologist, multi-instrumentalist and member of Melbourne/Naarm post-punk quartet Hexdebt, Isobel D'Cruz aka Hantu.

Carefully recorded and assembled in just one month following a year of global and internal uncertainty, 'Zither EP' flowers into life as a coy travelogue through lonely late nights and one's own inevitably distorted reflection. Its backbone a mellifluous interplay between kinetic field recordings and itinerant zither motifs, D'Cruz augments this story with bass, flute and additional production and instrumentation from Collected Dust.

A waterlogged, wordless dictaphone diary, flat on its back. A panorama from the hill at 5am, of what's not yet tomorrow.

Mastered by Guy Louis Faletolu.
credits
released August 24, 2022

nicemusic056
Nice Music 2022
20 minutes

Zither EP

Hantu 'Aesthetic Love Theme'

buy vinyl/digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

taken from Chloë Sobek 'Apotropaic' NM046

NM presents the debut LP from Melbourne/Naarm soloist and electronic composer Chloë Sobek.

Whilst gripping stages and audiences alongside much of Australia's most adventurous composers and performers over the past 2 years, 'Apotropaic' appears following a series of self-released single track hints via her bandcamp. Sobek instantly soars to characterise her arresting first statement, flitting between sound collage as a looming vaporous threat, restless swathes of electronic pointillism and her unmistakable pneumatic rain of extended/effected solo violone performance. Curiously, Sobek's instrument is a custom built violone; ostensibly a dynamic, spectral six-stringed baroque variation on the instrument we know today as double bass.

Wrenching the instrument for absurdist thrills and atonal mystique, Sobek's designs are a puzzle for the listener attempting to grasp the exact tone of 'Apotropaic'. An obsession with personal hidden meaning firmly buoys her sensibility when selecting a sound, inevitably spinning a labyrinthine cosmos that is at once both acutely figurative and intimately informed by Sobek's notions of the experiential.

Recorded and mixed by Chloë Sobek and Vijay Thillaimuthu.

Mastered by Joe Talia.

releases February 28, 2023

nicemusic046
Nice Music 2023
36 minutes

mastering
Joe Talia

nice music
2023

Apotropaic

Chloë Sobek 'Confluence'

buy LP/digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com & nicemusiclabel.com

NM is thrilled to present the new album from Mulubinba/Newcastle's J. Campbell. 'Erosion Of Memory' is profound innervision - a dramatic sandstorm through near-beatless landscapes, mapping Campbell's intrinsic understanding of family, familiarity and the firmament surrounding him.

Whilst welcomed with swells of distant sawmills, sub-bass and tree hollow synth pads on the titular opening track, Campbell bookends a variety of instrumentation with the blustering tonal constellations and cadenced peals of 'Parade At The Moorings'. Just as his dolorous chimes cycle relentlessly through 'Marked With A Cairn', 'Lost Bracelet' masterfully washes us with almost painfully intimate field recording patter and softly unresolved piano riffing. 'Convent' is akin to a train ride summoning Tangerine Dream's breathiest moments, 'The Lighthouse' is perhaps the affecting closer that Michael Mann's 'Heat' needed, if you're not such a Moby fan.

Campbell may be known to many for his urgent, thunderous industrial techno spectacle under the Collector alias since 2014, across a spate of releases for Steel City Beat Discs, Come Sundown and Nice Music, plus the very recent 'No Prospects' LP on Bank Records NYC. Under his own name, he describes his volume and tumult from a distant vantage point, conjuring greying widescreen vistas at sunset along the Australian central coastline he calls home. Campbell has developed a tempestuous mood and clarity, traced throughout releases for VAKNAR/VAAGNER, Summer Isle, Vienna Press and Strange Rules - 'Erosion Of Memory' mourns in optimal resolution, drawing us ever inward to attempt an understanding of time, grief and love - that which we can perhaps never fully grasp.

Dutifully recorded and mixed by JC himself and mastered by Sean McCann.

releases April 17, 2024

nicemusic061
39 minutes
nice music 2024

Erosion Of Memory

J. Campbell 'Lost Bracelet'

buy cassette and digital at nicemusiclabel.com and nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

NM is thrilled to present 7 tracks of variegated juke complexities and dismantled electro/breaks concepts from Naarm/Melbourne's Bad Ambulance (Jack Palmer). 'Intel 95' smashes boiled vocal fragments to powder over carefully cadenced chrome-plated rhythm networks and fluorescent synth tonality, pushed to obliteration inside the gleaming atmos of Palmer's spacious production gulfs.

Opening with the ostentatious cyborg poetry and never-ending knife edge triplets of 'Intel 95's title track, Palmer's obsession with fuelling the whirring turbine heart of this release is crystal clear. Whilst drawing lines through recognisable bass music forms, the heft of the Bad Ambulance dramaturgy swings hard enough into possessed outer-zones to constantly surprise and illuminate a synesthetic imagination. 'Future Ghost' plots sinewy shards of voice and sound ephemera as molecules into a centrifugal drug fog, 'Poison Is Medicine’s ciphered WWI combat medic manual plays out over paranoid synth dissonance and spiralling percussion, whilst the strict tethering of 'Trick' in its early stages blindsides us when its urgency snaps the leash in climax mid-track, before galloping into the distance to leave us in a virulent iridescence where it once stood.<br><br>'Intel 95' circles Palmer's interactions with computer music - reconsidering the under-resourced childhood awe of VGA screen promises as a millennial, whilst confronted with questions around the compositional capacities of how we feed ideas to modules in 2024's exploded tech dimensions.

Mastered by Guy Faletolu.

released May 21, 2024
nicemusic51
34 minutes
nice music 2024

Bad Ambulance 'Intel 95'

buy cd/digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com & nicemusiclabel.com

NM presents a new work from Naarm/Melbourne producer Rita Revell, 'Folded Volume 33'. Her flawless, uncategorisable self-release ‘Depozit’ (2022) and subsequent live shows led us to virtually demand more material from this largely mysterious, protean sound assembler.




'Folded Volume 33' is an evocative globe of electronic sound collage liturgies, a heaving topography vacillating with warm waves of fondness and cracked caves of mourning. Less abrasive or rhythmic than earlier work (see past releases on This Thing and Happy Endin'), hallowed images of loss and devotion are painted with arcane lashes of treated guitars and wind instruments, engraved amongst an evocative travelogue of tone collage. 'In Vit' undulates gently with rolls of bass and drifting pad drones, the soft tenderness of 'Persus' and 'Pretty Ugly' melt icecaps with their unabashed warmth - plaintive chordal structures and feathery guitar plucks, holding the chatter of any horror well off in the distance. Sorrow and stress do loom and flood routinely though - an acute moment of techno urgency on 'Baba', the savage industrial clatter of 'White Tail Brain', 'Rat In The Wall's discombobulated warping and grasping for the reins once more.




The track titles seem wistfully loaded with backstories we'll never know ('Off You Go', 'St Vins Cowboy', 'Four Years'), mirroring extracts of yearning, hope and deliverance - feelings akin to finding a single faded tarot card or rediscovering a sound or song you'd taped as a child. Shrouded in deeply coded personal significance and assembled with stern care and strength, 'Folded Volume 33' is but a glimpse of an existence Revell chooses to share.




Cover art and concept by Bradley Pinkerton

Mastered by Guy Faletolu



released July 31, 2024

nicemusic55
35 minutes
nice music 2024

Folded Volume 33

Buy/Listen

Rita Revell 'Pretty Ugly'

buy cassette/digital at nicemusiclabel.com and nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

Nice Music Label presents ‘THRASH’ - an incendiary new collaborative recording from indefinable, incomparable modern giant of electronic music Actress (Darren Cunningham) and NM’s own label head, capricious sound artist Simon J Karis.

Actress and SJK stir up their intertwining trademark elements into a clandestine symmetrical arc over three tracks - each of them bestowing their own edit of ‘THRASH’, with Karis’ urgent acid thumper as a centerpiece. Both drastically remapping their razored hardware collision, staunchly gnawing their respective sounds into oblivion and back again.

Incongruously, Karis drags the duo into his world of “noise” treatments and hifi harshness, all parping distortion and compressed hypercolours, yet Cunningham threads his instantly recognisable swoops of synth graffiti, 8-bit fx throttle and percussive errata in a perfect symbiosis of their palettes.

‘Darren edit’ breathes more and jogs along sparsely enough to deny any requirements of progression from the tenets of electro concepts hinted at, surfing through knackered programming and a circuitous routine of synthetic howls and ragged blipscapes. ‘Simon edit’ actively seeks progression, folding in on itself over its 5+ minutes before reaching its zenith of aquatic riffage and elevated melodic bombast. Karis’ solo track ‘night glaze smashed chalice.alp’ is artfully imposed right in between the two edits of ‘THRASH’ - a muscular 4/4 acid burner, hissing abjectly with refracted room sound and textural horror. Hard as nails. 

released July 25, 2024

nicemusic058
16 minutes
Nice Music 2024

Actress, Simon J Karis 'Thrash' [Darren edit]

buy cd/book/digital at nicemusiclabel.com & nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

A new album by Simon J Karis, the follow up to 2017's 'Madrugada'. Widely available digitally and in a limited CD edition, housed in a deluxe bound A5 book of watercolour illustrations by Andrew Chalk. Mastered by Kane Ikin.

Read more on 'So Little Sorrow' below, by Francis Plagne...

"Nice Music head honcho Simon Karis returns with So Little Sorrow, his first full-length release since 2017’s Madrugada. Clocking in at just under half an hour, these ten tracks further hone Karis’ distinctive brand of crunchy electronic bombast. Emotive yet deeply twisted, they obey a hermetic internal logic that, as listeners, we can only glimpse. Abrupt edits and striking changes in mood from piece to piece are the rule on 'So Little Sorrow', which possesses a raw immediacy that calls to mind the unvarnished, straight-to-hard-disc approach of classic Pita and the playful minimalism of early Asmus Tietchens.

On opener ‘Legend Status: Denied’, a massive, glitching squarewave monody is tickled by sputtering electronic fizz, growing increasingly agitated and dense across its four minutes. While some tracks touch on club music signifiers (like the ominous synth pads of ‘Breakfast Circle: Obliterated’ or the mutant electro underpinning ‘fuckdance33’), much of the music here adopts abstract forms, whether dissolving into shimmering ambience or amping up into saturated noise. Karis’ devious sense of humour, always pushing at the limits of good taste, is on display on tracks like the urgent 8-bit take on To Live and Die in L.A. moves on ‘Templestowe Badman’. Or take ‘Being Driven’, which sounds like a deranged imitation of Kraftwerk’s ‘Kometenmelodie 1’ ripped from a straight-to-video nasty. And while the hissing, buried sonics of tracks like ‘Jams Manager’ align Karis’ work with lo-fi explorers like Thought Broadcast, he isn’t content to wallow in the murk, opening tracks like ‘Roses’ up into saturated technicolor hues.

'So Little Sorrow' is accompanied by a deluxe booklet reproducing a series of watercolours by legendary British ambient musician Andrew Chalk, whose work, developed over more than thirty years, has included collaborations with Organum and New Blockaders (and his own ‘noise’ project Ferial Confine), the haunted ambience of Mirror (with Christoph Heemann) and the endlessly fecund exploration of delicate pastoral atmosphere with Timo van Luijk in Elodie, as well as dozens of solo releases. Chalk has designed (and often hand-assembled) many of his own releases over the years in his signature, meticulous style, often using his own drawings, paintings and monoprints as imagery. Here we are treated to a suite of his recent watercolour paintings, ushering the viewer into a dreamlike space populated by birds, flowers and dazzling washes of colour. Reflecting Chalk’s interest in the illuminations of William Blake, Japanese screen painting and Russian folk art, these images are glimpses into a private art practice essentially remote from the concerns of contemporary culture. While Karis’ love of Chalk’s music is evident at times on 'So Little Sorrow', like on the ecstatic filter sweeps of ‘Peregrina’, which is almost like a beefed up take on the sounds explored on Chalk’s beloved Violin by Night, at other points the delicacy of the imagery might seem at odds with the intensity of Karis’ music; what the two share is simply their dedication to crafting an intuitive, idiosyncratic manner of expression." 
credits
released November 15, 2024

Music and layout by Simon J Karis
Electric guitar on track 8 by WPH
Illustrations by Andrew Chalk
Mastered by Kane Ikin

NM059
30 minutes
Nice Music 2024

So Little Sorrow

Roses

Buy cassette/digital now at nicemusiclabel.com & nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

A drastic left turn from NM label head Simon J Karis, following some notable 2024 output. The manic jubilance of both last year’s ‘THRASH’ (his collaborative effort with UK experimental/club royalty Actress) and his hugely evocative, slightly foolish solo full length ‘So Little Sorrow’ (accompanied by a book of 50 watercolour paintings by legendary ambient musician and visual artist Andrew Chalk) commanded new ears and scratched heads further across the globe than Karis had enjoyed prior.

So with that, he flings us the first documentation of his ongoing live performance project ‘Smashed Platitudes’, a rough-hewn collage of recordings on stages and in hotel rooms across Australia - a constant work in progress, auditing itself in real time in front of intimate audiences. Karis’ creative process in these takes is indeed a collage approach in itself; a fractured and intuitive rearranging of concrète recordings captured in travelogue, some particularly jagged synthesis and lashings of noise interruptions to break up this constant jawing;

Because most notably, Karis’ voice is the constant thread throughout; we hear him speaking clearly and closely, sometimes wilfully obscured and surprisingly, often singing. His words are chosen immediately before us in the workspaces we’re let into, through automatic writing, both as pen on paper and incanted into the air. Though in moments where he finds himself nudging the diaristic, devout crypticism will slither in to wash our attention over into the next movement. Reflected in the information overload of the track titles, Karis wants audiences to suspend the idea of needing to understand what they’re witnessing whilst presented with a great deal of description, urging them to instead simply cherish whatever non-literal profundity might come to heart by the end of the affair. It’s in this sense that he is attempting to join the audience, leaving the performance as much to his subconscious as is possible - by then auditing what comes out, a sort of open air feedback loop is created, fuelling its auto-cognition.

Keen ears will hear brief live renderings of material from ‘So Little Sorrow’ encrusted in the final throes of ‘Smashed Platitudes’, blasted into the red as confrontational noise tantrums. It’s a means of highlighting the dramedy which Karis goes to pained lengths to express in all his output to date, disparate though it may look whilst juxtaposed with his previous work over the last 5 years; the acid techno malfunctioning of ‘THRASH’, the assured synth melodrama of ‘So Little Sorrow’ and 'Piovve' and the stoned warblings of ‘Cassowary Paint’.

NM063
30 minutes
Nice Music 2024

Smashed Platitudes Avillion, Abbotsford, Adelaide/Heaps Of Sorrow

BUY/LISTEN

My trillions, audited as a puppet soliloquy, fucking livid, aggressively medium

Who is this guy? Indeed a magically sad and cheap Christmas

Bashed up like nothing else at the Industrial School

Nothing personal in the entire bong waft glossary when I was there Tuesday so have one last rip before the pax died about 8 years ago

Nothing personal in the entire bong waft glossary when I was there Tuesday so..

Honestly I may never eat breakfast again

Helen became instantly pregnant in Mykonos after her sixth climax and after just a moment she then imagined the child's face at 6 years old

Helen became instantly pregnant in Mykonos after her sixth climax and after just a...

Tina Stefanou 'There Is A Dead Rabbit Under The Greek: Eating Uncle George Family Unit'

Tina Stefanou 'Hymn To The Dirt Bike Rider'

Tina Stefanou 'The Ball: The Drummer'

Tina Stefanou 'Hym(e)nals: Undressing Vowels'

Tina Stefanou 'There Is A Dead Rabbit Under The Greek Family Unit: Group Circle'

Tina Stefanou 'Back-Breeding: Horse Distance'

Tina Stefanou 'Miming For Mines: Church Dance'

Tina Stefanou 'Dance The War Of Proximity: Jasmine's Solo'

buy digital at nicemusiclabel.com & nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

Naarm/Melbourne-based composer, vocalist and multimedia artist officially joins NM with a new single, 'op.1 ādam' - streaming everywhere from mid-September.

Flittering open with its arpeggiated petals and subsuming sub bass tones, ‘op.1 ādam’ immediately breathes through Jadu’s layered autotune vocal gliding across the stereo field. As the bass then relents in waves, the constant arp progresses with tactile kineticism into playful squelching, while obtusely room mic’d flute and clarinet snake into focus. The group’s intertwining of its decided strands of assiduous synthesis and acoustic performance acts as a means of dimension-building, creating a split-level structure; the fabric of which we are slowly drawn into, in between and released from, as though passing weightlessly through the Magellanic Clouds at a velocity indiscernible between lightspeed and subatomic stasis.

Featuring contributions from Mildlife's Adam Halliwell on flute, composer and clarinetist Aviva Endean and longtime AJ collaborator Emma Ovenden on synths, 'op.1 ādam' is taken from a forthcoming full length 'SICFWYLF' released on NM in 2026. Over 5 years in the making, 'SICFWYLF' marks Aarti's first album release since her much loved debut 'L'Ecole De La Caz' in 2022.

nicemusic074S
6 minutes

op.1 ādam

Buy digital/LP+book at nicemusiclabel.com & nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

You Can’t See Speed is a limited-edition vinyl accompanying the artist’s major solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Attending to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision, You Can’t See Speed features vocal resonances and spoken descriptions written and recorded in collaboration with participants from Stefanou’s film works, alongside music composed by the artist. A cacophony of lived experience, oral storytelling, and vocality.

The B-side centres a collaboration with blind motorbike mechanic and rider Matthew Cassar and composer Joseph Franklin. Anchored in ideals of trust and experimentation, the work traces Cassar’s journey through high-performance dirt bike riding as a surrealist voyage of adrenaline and self-actualisation. In his own voice, Cassar reflects on the layered worlds—both on screen and within—where ‘image meets experience’. Cinema becomes sensorium, as singing, thrumming, electronically mediated dirt bikes, outer-suburban field recordings, exhausted vocalities, hymns, trumpets, harmonics and grain converge in a rush of sonic and embodied image-making.


released July 10, 2025


nicemusic066
41 minutes
Nice Music Label 2025

You Can't See Speed

buy digital/cassette edition at nicemusiclabel.com & nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

Bassist and composer Joseph Franklin returns to NM for a wildstyle heat exchange, actioned live in collaboration with synthesist, composer and improviser Ben Carey. Modestly, this one does what it says on the box, however ‘a thousand tiny mutinies live’ revises motifs and prompts from Franklin’s solo bass and extended technique LP for NM in 2024 with spectacular license, captured in stunning high resolution audio.

Surrounded by an encircling audience, Franklin’s fragmented acoustic cycles issued from an array of instruments and sources were splayed across 4 channels at Brunswick’s Quadraphonic Club via Carey’s impressively restrained synthesis, software interaction and live engineering, mixed down to stereo for this release. The duo’s staggering meshes lurch from blistering to elongated and back again, often as tactile as they are psychically liquefied, both performances rippling at each other’s wide-eyed interpolations.

Quantitively, mere sinews of the original work flit in and out of focus, yet these strands are most noticeable even to those with a cursory familiarity with ‘a thousand tiny mutinies’. Carey’s attention to detail and care in the mix actively places Franklin’s performance in sharpest focus, re-nesting these percussive, often inter-tonal molecules into a realm of digital faceting, dragging their shared rationale into the cosmological. 

Frightening in its unpredictable objectives, this rare capture of a duo in such gleaming, inspired symbiosis does not strike so often.

a thousand tiny mutinies live (excerpt)

Bassist and composer Joseph Franklin returns to NM for a wildstyle heat exchange, actioned live in collaboration with synthesist, composer and improviser Ben Carey. Modestly, this one does what it says on the box, however ‘a thousand tiny mutinies live’ revises motifs and prompts from Franklin’s solo bass and extended technique LP for NM in 2024 with spectacular license, captured in stunning high resolution audio.

Surrounded by an encircling audience, Franklin’s fragmented acoustic cycles issued from an array of instruments and sources were splayed across 4 channels at Brunswick’s Quadraphonic Club via Carey’s impressively restrained synthesis, software interaction and live engineering, mixed down to stereo for this release. The duo’s staggering meshes lurch from blistering to elongated and back again, often as tactile as they are psychically liquefied, both performances rippling at each other’s wide-eyed interpolations.

Quantitively, mere sinews of the original work flit in and out of focus, yet these strands are most noticeable even to those with a cursory familiarity with ‘a thousand tiny mutinies’. Carey’s attention to detail and care in the mix actively places Franklin’s performance in sharpest focus, re-nesting these percussive, often inter-tonal molecules into a realm of digital faceting, dragging their shared rationale into the cosmological. 

Frightening in its unpredictable objectives, this rare capture of a duo in such gleaming, inspired symbiosis does not strike so often.

a thousand tiny mutinies live

buy/stream

Bad Ambulance returns to NM with ‘Possessor’. 2 tracks of hallucinated juke, vocal automations and warped polyrhythms - a tantalising follow up to last year’s breakthrough release ‘Intel 95’.

‘Possessor’ hisses and wriggles wildly into surprisingly hazy ecstasy, arpeggiating skyward, whilst retaining Melbourne/Naarm-based producer Jack Palmer’s trademark anxiety rhythms and minor key stress waves. Euphoric sheen pixelates into digitised, dripping horror movie foley in ‘Zero’, bringing to life a foreboding arrhythmic thump at mid tempo. Phrases of softly mathematical rhythms escalate Palmer’s neon tension strategies; alarms are raised, phased sawtooth signals flatline through the wooze. And what’s more, this overwhelming robotic ecology seems to stare blankly over our heads while it scares the shit out of us - inexplicably austere as it teeters on the brink of collapse.

Produced by Bad Ambulance (Jack Palmer)
Mixed by Jack Palmer at Imprint Audio

Mastered by Nicholas Di Lorenzo at Panorama Mastering

Cover art:
Concept by Jack Palmer
Design & type by Simon J Karis
3D by Hugh Stuart

Possessor

Zero

buy tape + digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com - also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Juno Download and more.

taken from Joe Talia + Chalk/Chetwin/Plagne 'Split' NM002

Melbourne’s Joe Talia is one of the most respected, able and creative players in Australia’s adventurous music community – as a drummer/percussionist he has played perhaps most notably in recent times in the evolving collaborative piece ‘Knots’ with Oren Ambarchi, as well as within his ongoing and influential role in Francis Plagne’s stunning backing ensemble alongside James Rushford, Judith Haman and Alex Garsden, among others. As a sound recordist/engineer he has explored new territory tirelessly in collaboration with many like-minded operators, all the while refining his ultimately unique approach to sound design and capture. ‘12th Exit’ is a mystifying and magical circular drift through a cumulus realm of tones and obscured familiarity. Its skewed environmental constructions are as comforting as they are confounding as the 12 minute piece shifts its way through a spectacularly sedated fug.

Joe Talia '12th Exit'

buy tape + digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com - also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Juno Download and more.

taken from Various Asses 'Loción' NM010

Nice Music proudly presents the marauding debut release from Various Asses. Melbourne's Raquel Solier has incongruously created a terrifying new variety of mean, hi-sheen bass music. Bent trap, obnoxious rhythm workouts and frantic house literally seethe at you from the speakers, both on 'Loción' or when one bears witness to the convulsive pummel of her live show. Fractured vocal samples snap from all angles throughout, punctuating dense waves of meticulously sculpted sound, designed to both make you move and scare the living shit out of you. There is a hyper aware level of conceptual processing and blindingly precise execution at play here, both of which show a level of sophistication and creative ambition not often seen in many producers within these realms. For fans of Amnesia Scanner, Ital Tek.

Loción

Various Asses 'Hood Team'

buy tape + digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com - also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Juno Download and more.

taken from Nina Buchanan 'Sunk' NM009

Debut release of hi-res, bare bones hardware techno from Melbourne-based synthesis explorer Nina Buchanan. Parallel to creating woozy extended synth pop jams in duo Video Ezy (Paradise Daily) as well as pushing dynamic textural noise forms into unique shapes in UTI (duo with Maya Kjellstrand of Bleach Boys, Leopard Leg), Buchanan has arrived at a precision nexus of brutalist techno and a truly uplifting style of ecstatic melodic synth riffage. Conjuring thick atmospheres and tonalities with almost blu-ray levels of vibrancy is perhaps in essence attributable to the simplicity of her chosen elements; 1 synth, 1 drum machine - the rest is purely incendiary sparks, resonating brightly in the spaces in between. For fans of Helena Hauff, Regis, Nitzer Ebb.

Sunk

Nina Buchanan 'Waiting Game'

buy tape + digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com - also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Juno Download and more.

taken from Nina Buchanan 'Highly Emotional' NM021

Highly Emotional

Nina Buchanan 'Cyndi's Theme'

buy tape + digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com - also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Juno Download and more.

taken from Fia Fiell 'All In The Same Room' NM020

Fia Fiell 'At The First Clear Word'

buy vinyl/digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

taken from Thomas Hardisty 'Peace In The Plaza' NM028V

Nice Music presents the debut album proper from Melbourne's Thomas Hardisty, known for his varied and imaginative contributions to Nun, Constant Mongrel, Woollen Kits and more. Hardisty has quietly laboured on 'Peace In The Plaza' over the 2 years leading up to its release, taking time to channel the wordless profundity which fills this record in plumes of contemplative melody and warmth. His placid focus on understated expression on this recording seems to be fueled deeply by its decided concept; a study of the mind's quiet hours which bookend the working day's concerns. This essence slides glacially within a specific physical space, encapsulated entirely by the suburban valley in which Hardisty has found himself - Northcote's verdant suburban strips which back onto parkland and more namely, the somewhat notorious Northcote Plaza. The ghosts of concepts such as sobriety or daily responsibility linger with indolence in the distance while this music gives space to a purer consciousness, albeit within a commonly experienced inner city milieu. Hardisty wields the sleight of hand to animate this juxtaposition, intangibly and lovingly. 

For fans of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Abul Mogard

Peace in the Plaza

Peace In The Plaza

Thomas Hardisty 'Peace in the Plaza'

buy cassette/digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

taken from Simon J Karis 'Piovve' NM039

Simon J Karis returns to Nice Music with Piovve, his first release for the label since 2017’s Madrugada. Following from recent releases for Altered States and Vienna Press, Piovve offers up six tracks demonstrating the development and deepening of Karis’ obliquely emotive approach to electronic murk. Floating on clouds of tape hiss in smeared VHS fidelity, Karis explores a range of formal approaches, from the burbling monophonic synth lines and spoken text of opener ‘Infinite July’ to the four-on-the-floor kickdrum and wistful music-box melodies of half-remembered rave closer ‘Shale Pardon’. In between we’re treated to the drumless motorik propulsion of ‘To Think of You’, which calls to mind Moebius and Beerbohm’s Double Cut in its woozy rhythmic insistence before the mood is hijacked by a distorted devotional vocal sample that abruptly reroutes proceedings from the morose to the ecstatic. The opposite path is travelled in ‘On Ardour’ where jittering synth pads toy with euphoria before descending into pensive gloom. Across these six miniatures – each of which concludes with an abrupt cut to silence – Karis mines a vein where sonic experimentation and emotional reflection meet, crafting something uneasy but ultimately celebratory. -Francis Plagne

For fans of Cluster, Actress

Piovve

Simon J Karis 'Infinite July'

buy cassette/digital nicemusiclabel.bandcamp.com

taken from Low Flung 'Microscope Impressions' NM038

Nice Music presents 'Microscope Impressions', an uncategorizable and commanding new full length statement from New South Wales-based producer Danny Wild, aka Low Flung. Cemented as a puzzlingly creative and prolific Australian underground hero within ambient study, experimental synthesis and functional dance music, Wild's stamp is well documented across releases on Paper-Cuts, Ken Oath, Phinery, Butter Sessions, Chemical Imbalance, Bedroom Suck and his own label, Moontown.

'Microscope Impressions' whirrs and flashes with a type of biological fluidity, both in its essence and its presentation - seemingly describing its own creation as it occurs, we hear a stream of consciousness cloudy with the colours of Wild's unpredictable sonic impulses, revealing itself from the opening moments. Liquid samples, repurposed drum sounds and patinas of synth litter all elongate and meld with each other's perceptible form, abstracting the recording's cadence and intent over 9 tracks. Wild has indeed created a close up glimpse through his microcosmic lens, into a realm which is easier to feel and hear than see or touch.

for fans of Pole, Andrew Pekler

releases February 11, 2021

nicemusic038
Nice Music 2020
40 minutes

Microscope Impressions

Low Flung 'Pin Sweat'

nicemusiclabel.com Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

Nice Music Label

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