Nihiloxica – Source of Denial

Crammed Discs

Source Of Denial — a simple, apropos punning album name — hits the air with “Kudistro”, frantic organic drumming and blaring electronics that suggest an adrenaline junkie rave-up or the klaxon wails of public emergency.

A faux IVR menu offers us options to shift colonial guilt and blame. After a more percussion-forward tune, “Asidi” brings back the tocsin toll of the opener; but more subdued, menacing, followed by a spoken “Interrogation / Intro” that places us on the receiving end of universal McCarthyist suspicion.

The title track seethes and grooves in equal measure. Further tracks take us through a gauntlet of moods and tempos, although the prevailing mode is an uncanny haunting, an evocation of tired huddled masses shuffling through labyrinthine corridors, when they are not attempting dangerous border and sea crossings or simply waiting in anteroom after anteroom.

A collaboration between traditional Ugandan drummers and electronic artists, Nihiloxica has no conventional melody players. Instead they offer a canny cerebral display of tempo, rhythmic cellularism and sonic sculpting that tells a story all too ubiquitous amidst increased human displacement and migration. An album to exist within, facing the trouble.

It ends with a busy signal and a call being cut. Your query has been denied.

-Jayaprakash Satyamurthy-