Copenhagen's Nick Eriksen makes electronic music that's as playfully elaborate as his moniker, Taragana Pyjarama. Following a debut EP whose reliance on submerged samples smacked of chillwave, Eriksen signed to Kompakt for his more distinctive first LP, Tipped Bowls, where he expanded his software synths with limber analog hardware. It was a sunny and delightful deluge of clear but unusual shapes, with rich, high-contrast timbres and granulated rhythms swarming around house beats both implied and explicit. The Kompakt contract presumably goes on, and Nothing Hype, released on Eriksen's own Wyrd imprint, feels like a stopgap until then. It's billed as a "mini-LP," though ironically, the longer Tipped Bowls got more into the miniature spirit. That almost demented level of fine detail thins out into broader strokes on Nothing Hype, an agreeable but less unique record.
To get a sense of the difference between Tipped Bowls and Nothing Hype, check out each of their atmospheric opening tracks. On the former's "Four Legged", a panning notch smears a tone cluster as sub-rhythms bubble through, while on the latter's "With Me", a delayed chord progression glides along in a stately fashion, the accents accumulating on the beats instead of whirling and scattering across them. On the first, there always seem to be 10 things happening at once, while on the other, nothing much happens at all. This atypical complacency is elsewhere most apparent on "PUR 1", where a rubbery attack builds toward little more than some flanged harmonies and jammy synth intervals. These are smoothly pumping pistons, but Eriksen neglected to festoon them with tiny moving parts.
Absent that intricacy, the dance tracks are the most engaging and liberated-feeling ones. The prancing "RAR", lush and sultry in the manner of Dutch producer Applescal, is enriched by lingering harmonies that erratically well up, though it's hard to pick out any decisive climax or shift in their seven minutes of variable iteration. "Touching" makes for a dynamic highlight, though it sharply recalls a tamed version of "Ribbons" by professed Eriksen influence Four Tet. That leaves only "Beam", where a gently wobbling instrumental doesn't rise to the dramatic level of the vocalist, Kicki Halmos, and "Lore (Merged)", a small afterthought of a crescendo. Nothing Hype sets out its modest aims in its title, and the exploded diagrams of Tipped Bowls settle back into something more diagrammatic. It's a nice listen but not a very idiosyncratic one; one trusts that Eriksen is simply skimming off the top of his creative reservoir, already proven to be deep, until his next proper LP.
