Nina Buchanan: Restless Abandon | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- My first exposure to Nina Buchanan’s work was the excellent advance, Skiddiks, from her new full-length, Restless Abandon. Sharp, syncopated beats and bright synth are, at first glance, her stock in trade, creating thrumming dancefloor fodder, although some of her other electronica wanders further afield. There’s something that’s slightly hard to pin down in her work. For instance, it takes in the propulsion of techno and the creativity of idm, without ever leaning hard into the extremities of either; the music wends its own path, never feeling pressured to be other than what it is. It’s as though NB has a broad, somewhat vague memory of a lot of the electronic sounds of the ‘90s and beyond and is just tripping through it, however the inspiration takes her. While I was busy scratching my head trying to theorise dance music (if you see someone doing this - stop them!), one thing became clear, whatever thread Nina Buchanan is following, it is, undeniably, a journey of grace.

The Naarm/Melbourne producer has been putting out material for at least six years and has the pedigree of an experimentalist - releasing records and tapes on severely stylish labels like Nice Music and Paradise Daily. It makes sense that you’d find her here in the Heavy Machinery roster, with all of the other sophisticates taking part in Melbourne City’s astonishingly fruitful Flash Forward project that’s been pumping out record after great record, producing some memories of the COVID years we’ll actually want to hold on to.

She talks like an experimentalist too. Buchanan is a ‘synthesis explorer’, searching for something transcendent ‘between rhythm and melody, between classifications of genre, between an immediate tumult of feelings and a yearning for something better’. I had wondered if it was gilding the lily a bit, putting a theoretical framework on dance music that was pretty stubbornly resisting it.

Digging into the rest of Restless Abandon, it lives up to the title, initially at least, contorting through a lot of really angular syncopation. Occasionally this produces hints of other styles: is that an undercurrent of footwork in Carrier Bag and Sloopy? The trap in There, Together is much more obvious, but, blended into gently but insistently swelling ambient beats, it’s nice to hear it deployed in a way that’s a good deal subtler than ninety-nine percent of the rest of the genre.

Shifter is surely a candidate for a third single. Packing a little less bass power than Skiddiks its plaintive synth melodies soar high into the trebles out of a soft focus, ambient production sound; it brings fond memories of Boards Of Canada. There’s an increasingly contemplative air on the b-side and a cut like Is It Real possesses an elegance and melancholy poise in its sedate synthwave. This slow decline is really only interrupted by second single Rinse, kicking it on the dancefloor just once more, for what is the most trad techno here. Album closer Whim is even more quiet and mannered and -in a complete departure from the Restless Abandon- we close in an elegiac mood, on music that seems more appropriate for a harpsichord in a drawing room, than a discotheque.

I’m pretty sure I approached Restless Abandon in completely the wrong way. I came expecting disparate, extreme styles slammed together into something unsettling and new. Instead, for all its leaping rhythms, this is a record that efficiently subsumes its component parts and does it so effectively I often didn’t notice it was happening. From the wild energy with which it opens to the subtle sadness with which it closes, it took me a deal of time to understand this tumult of feelings and just what Nina Buchanan has made of them. This one woman, with her one synth and one drum machine has faced down her Restless Abandon, sublimating it into music of uncommon, elegant simplicity.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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