Nosaj Thing is Jason Chung, a 24-year-old producer from California with loose ties to Flying Lotus and the L.A. glitch-hop scene. His gorgeously haunted debut Drift makes it clear that while he shares a lot with Flying Lotus-- a base of operations, like-minded compatriots, a deep love of hip-hop and a thousand strains of electronic music-- they're pretty far apart in terms of approach. Spatially speaking, Flying Lotus' music is like a cluttered studio apartment overflowing with interesting bric-a-brac-- hip-hop records, comics, pieces of modern art. Chung's music, meanwhile, is spacious and reverberant, every element echoing into the emptiness surrounding it. Drift came out on Alpha Pup, the label run by underground hip-hop producer Daddy Kev, and Nosaj Thing produced tracks on Busdriver's latest record, but Drift has little of anything that might be recognized as "hip-hop" on it, none of Flying Lotus' breakbeats or his analog-tape warmth. From a mood point of view, its gloomy beatscapes have a lot more in common with the bass-heavy London dubstep scene than anything his fellow L.A. laptop nerds are doing.
*Drift'*s dubstep influence is immediately apparent in the chilly minor-key synths and fractured, ghostly drum programming of "Us" and "Fog", which evokes Burial. Chung has a similar flair for atmospherics and fondness for dank spaces; the drum sounds on "IOIO" resemble both the dripping of leaky pipes and swarming, squeaking rats. He also shares a firm belief that great drum sounds come from everywhere. On "1685/Bach", for instance, they come from the peeling of masking tape and jingling change.
This magpie ear for odd, leftfield sounds is Drift's most explicit link to glitch-hop. The endlessly pinging synthesizer on "Light #1" seems to careen off every available surface, while it's companion "Light #2" builds from a prism of Tron-like laser blurts. Chung clearly relishes a good rug-pulling, and he plays a thousand little tricks on your senses throughout the record-- breathing sounds fluttering high in the mix, echoing, hall-of-mirrors synthesizers. Occasionally, things get a little too lava-lamp; I wouldn't want to listen to "Coat of Arms" while stoned, as I think the halting strobe-light effect might make me seasick.
Chung is clearly also fascinated by darkness and impenetrability, and Drift is filled with nighttime sounds. The brief moments of light, when they penetrate, feel slightly unreal; the woozy major chords of "2222" sound submerged, an impression reinforced by the sucking sounds surrounding them, similar to the noises you hear in your ears as you swim for the surface of a pool. At the two-minute mark in "Light #1" synths streak across the track like shafts of sunlight, and on "Lords", the final track, we're surprised by the late entrance of a rarely heard sound on the LP-- harmonized human voices, relatively untouched by filtering and effects, cooing wordlessly. It's a last dose of cold water to the face on a record full of such moments. There are sonic Easter Eggs for a thousand listens here, and it would take six pairs of headphones and an equal number of high-grade strains of weed to track them all down. Happy hunting.
