Growing up in one of America’s fastest-shrinking cities—the flood-prone steel town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania—Tatiana Triplin didn’t have much of a choice but to find a musical community online. As a fledgling electronic music nerd, she sought out the work of artists like Aphex Twin, DJ Rashad, and Moodymann—cutting-edge musicians within the techno and house spectrum who would shape the elysian, loopy music she makes as Nondi_. On her 2023 debut, Flood City Trax, she sought to capture the isolation of living in a place like Johnstown, where last call might be 8:30 p.m. and most clubs are the social kind. On that album, space-age synths sailed into the sky and broken chimes emerged like salt crystals jutting from brine, as if Triplin were attempting to write a new score for Fantastic Planet.
You might feel called to place Nondi_ in the world of producers like DJ Girl or auntie, whose cloudy bedroom footwork is less suited for the dancefloor than a cozy conversation pit. But take another look under the hood, and Triplin’s music is less derivative of any club scene than the avant-garde artists who occasionally pass through them. The beats, muted and gristly, sound indebted to the dust-coated electronica of Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Boards of Canada. Her rhythms maintain the skeletons of footwork and breakcore, but like smoke into an excited beehive, the production’s lo-fi, post-internet vapor produces something more sedated—what I’ll call dream juke.
She releases her official second album, Nondi..., to a devoted fanbase that includes Loraine James and Lone. Triplin hoped to express “the sense of freedom I used to get from music when I was first discovering it all,” she explains in its liner notes. Free-wheeling and overflowing with dopamine, the songs on Nondi… feel like electronic renderings of the vacuous promise of connection in digital society. Baubles of peachy synths and cinematic ’80s pads embellish “Just Hanging Out (Reprise),” which bounces upward like a flurry of heart emojis. The dainty synth loops on “I’m Fading Shifts Into Leather Shadows” flutter and rotate like synchronized swimmers. Triplin’s 8-bit synths dance like daffodils in the wind on “I Version Melody” as triplets of cartoonish chirps get together to form the dantiest juke rhythm.
Traditional footwork is a trickster—a genre produced with the purpose of surprising light-footed dancers by introducing new rhythms every few bars. Here Nondi..., which is for the most part grounded in several unchanging loops, separates itself from its electronic roots. “For Bluetooth Speakers Only” plays like insectoid dembow on blown-out speakers, its chintzy, endlessly repeating melody ringing out over gravelly beats. This is outstanding living room music—like a modern, Mid-Atlantic take on Japanese environmental music, meant to crackle gloriously in the background of mundane life.
But where Flood City Trax nailed the craft of creating the perfect loop—the one that you hope will never end—the experimental turns on Nondi… leave a lingering sense of being slightly unfinished. “Unrendered Location” opens on a distorted ghetto house beat that remains unchanged for nearly 30 seconds, until it starts to sound as though a DJ has left on auto-loop for a few bars too long. “Death Juke” assembles the whine of a camera flash, what sounds like HBO static, and a latticework of clipped alien voices into a pleasant mechanical churn. After the song is done, though, its building blocks seem to evaporate from memory; their vaporousness left me yearning for more surprises, or a tighter lock on the groove.
Still, there’s a quality of quiet power here. In the album’s most beautiful moments, Triplin makes arpeggios sound like prancing through an earthly paradise and sands off juke’s rough edges to produce rhythms that seem to chug along in the margins of a daydreaming brain. “Saltrun,” one of the album’s sleepiest songs, drifts through synths as soothing as warm milk while a gruff automaton vocal intones, “Without their leadership, the corporations are powerless.” It’s the only real lyric on the album, and its final syllable wobbles and echoes far into the distance. In moments like these, Nondi feels far away from her influences, and more like she’s inviting you into the secret, celestial palace of her mind.
