Salt Lake City, Utah-based electronic producer Nonnon (real name Dave Madden) first emerged back in 2007 with his collaborative debut album alongside fellow producer Lapsed ‘The Death Of Convenience’, an extremely varied and impressive collection that showed the duo moving confidently between edgy IDM, glitchy elements and industrial hiphop overtones. Two years on, this second album on Automation ‘The Entitlement Generation’ sees Nonnon ditching the collaborators in favour of working solo, and the added kicker is that this record comes in only two formats – digital download and cassette tape. I have to confess in this case that I opted for the CDR review copy included in my package, rather than ferreting through my cupboards in search of my old Denon deck. In comparison to ‘The Death Of Convenience’, which seemed virtually completely crammed with sonic detail, the thirteen tracks collected here see Nonnon working with a comparatively stripped-back aesthetic that leans primarily towards industrial-edged instrumental hiphop grooves.
Indeed, opening track ‘Coil Is Playing At My House (My House)’ at first represents something of a forbidding entry point, building a sparse, deconstructed beat groove around eerie growling bass synths, clanking metallic tones and bursts of distorted noise, ‘They Get It From An Elf’s Head’ sees more of a discernible groove locking in amidst glitchy Dabryre-meets-Prefuse 73 rhythms and burbling vintage vinyl samples, though the beats remain characteristically treacherous throughout. Elsewhere, ‘Whimp And A Wham (Steinski Done It Again)’ provides what’s easily one of this collection’s most uprock, party-friendly offerings as samples of a Steinski doco interview get cut and sliced up over a juddering backdrop of seismic MPC grooves that calls to mind sections of Ninja Tunes’ ‘Keepintime’ collection, before Nonnon’s remix of Nolens Volens’ ‘The First Instills Fear’ takes things out into edgy timestretched drum grooves and stuttery, cut up synth riifs in a headspinning detailed slice of digital editing that recalls Raoul Sinier’s similarly meticulous and creepy work. All up, fans of more noisy, industrial-edged hiphop along the lines of Dabrye, Techno Animal and the aforementioned Sinier should find much to admire here.
If you’re not after a cassette copy, you can pay what you want for the digital download of ‘The Entitlement Generation’ by going to Bandcamp.
Chris Downton
