Sig Nu Gris: Threshold | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Naarm / Melbourne based producer Erin Hyde, aka Sig Nu Gris, recently unleashed a whole album of her work, Threshold, on Tim Shiel’s Spirit Level label. Like a lot of the artists on the label her work references sounds that you know, but echoes them back at you in ways that will make you cock an ear and say, hey, that sounds different. There’s a real quantity of such unusual sounds here and as the title suggests, we’re just at the beginning.

Formerly based in -as she phrased it- ‘slightly bigger country town’ of Ngambri / Canberra, it suited Erin just fine to be a producer, hidden away, making bedroom beats on Ableton. Or, it sort of did. After realising that Tim Shiel’s left-field electronics show Something More was the only thing she could relate to on Triple-J, she reached out to him and began a new chapter as part of the Spirit Level community.

Spirit Level, with its highly collaborative process, artists appearing all over each other’s work, has always seemed as much a ‘community’ as a label. Hyde calls it her support network, which sounds nice. She moved to Naarm / Melbourne and with strong encouragement from Shiel began appearing all over Spirit Level releases, including a few of her own.

Of course, all this happened just as Dan Andrews locked the city down and threw away the key. If you’re wondering, I think this was, as for many on the slightly introverted side, a bit of a delight for Erin Hyde and a huge dose of creative fertiliser for Sig Nu Gris. In an interview back in 2020 she talked about the work she was keen to begin on: “...it might be an EP?” Haha, no, come 2022 and we’re gifted with that most un-dance of things, a full-length album.

The cuts are often fairly un-discotheque in their brevity too, but Hyde uses this as an opportunity to explore a variety of different sounds. The ones which are given pride of place are the most rhythmically wild: a single like Space Alen 100 is driving drum’n’bass, while Amphibia Blip Eladril reminds me of the classic idm of Squarepusher, which almost certainly pushes it into number one spot for my favourite of the record.

In the middle of the record the techno bangers start dropping and a title Ardkore Mega Expansion probably gives the game away on that one. I guess this explains why Nina Las Vegas has been taking an interest in Hyde’s output. In that left-field, Spirit-Level manner, none of this is cookie-cutter, however. Sig Nu Gris is all about heavy layering and texturing. Interestingly, in nearly every track, there’s usually a little vocal sample, nearly inaudible, chopped by the faint sound of it, from everyday life. It’s like a watermark for Hyde, a little checksum that lets her know this was something uniquely meaningful to her own life. Or maybe I’m completely off the mark there, who knows? I am curious though.

In a bold move, the back third of Threshold is completely composed of pretty experimental gestures, from weird, sci-fi soundscapes, to lilting piano vignettes and scary, dystopian industrial horrors (that one’s called Space Alen 300  which I initially mistook for the similarly named single Space Alen 100 - that would’ve been a bold gambit for radioplay!).

Threshold is a deeply eclectic record, like Sig Nu Gris was trying out absolutely everything she could think of, to show the world once we finally came out of lockdown. Is that the Threshold? What comes next? Do we see what sticks and head off in a more singular direction next, or is Erin Hyde’s musical landscape only going to get more crowded, weird and wonderful as time goes on. I'm sure she could get some suggestions from her mates, because she hasn’t even collaborated with even one other Spirit Level artist here, which, though understandable in the time of lockdown, is pretty much de rigeur. Whatever it is she decides to do I don’t doubt I’ll be here with an ear cocked, waiting to hear it.

- Chris Cobcroft.