Falle Nioke unveils his debut album on Eat Your Own Ears after years of refining his unique, mercurial sound. The result, Love From The Sea, comes from a planetary body all its own, a macrocosm where ancient and futuristic elements constellate into something wholly unique. Sumptuous in its textures, Falle Nioke’s latest release is exploding with fresh and intoxicating rhythms.
From a young age, Nioke had felt music as his calling. He eventually left his home to join Nimbé Sacré, a troupe of traveling musicians who performed across West Africa. Years later, while on a beach, he met a photographer, and in a twist of fate, encountered her again on the same beach three years later. They married soon after and eventually settled in Margate, UK. It was while working at a local venue there that Nioke found inspiration to fuse the familiar rhythms and tones of his Guinean heritage with the textures and production of electronic music.
Falle Nioke performs with traditional instruments, such as the gongoma, bolon, and cassi, and imbues his music with a depth that transcends the sum of its parts. Conveying complexities of expression and emotion across eight languages, he deftly transitions between French, English, Susu, Fulani, Malinké, and more.
Collaborating with producers such as Ghost Culture, Johan Hugo, and Mike Lindsay, as well as North London punk rapper TaliaBle on ‘LDN Girl’, Nioke merges Afrobeats with club-driven rhythms. The result is a kaleidoscopic coalescence of shapes and colours dancing behind your eyelids. Utilising analogue synths, hand percussion, traditional instruments, and modern production, Nioke composes a celestial body of its likeness, redolent of something both ancient and timeless.
The first track off the album, ‘Mousolou’, begins as a quiet kindling before the beat catches and erupts into fire, raging and alive, as warm and inviting as it is powerful, accumulating and dispersing into chaos in the sky. Complex layers weave together seamlessly, the percussion keeping the flame twisting and alive alongside embers of an electric guitar and the jazz-infused glow of a saxophone.
The title track, ‘Love From The Sea’, is just as alive. It’s bright with the sounds of a balafon, dripping delicately like water. Grounded in a warm bassline, the song accrues textures and sounds like a traveling wave before falling into a rhythm that collapses in perfect uniformity upon itself.
‘Heaviness’ (its opening phrase in Coniagui, Ma chiré, meaning “Call me”) is produced and mixed by Ghost Culture. A futuristic drone track sustained on the surface of an ambient bed, echoing with reverb, ambient swells, and modulation. As it floats along, the track gradually gathers moving parts until its full texture builds into a resolution. The most overtly dancefloor-friendly track on the album, ‘LDN Girl’, blares with a lammellophone motif flashing like a strobe light, bolstered by deep sub-bass and staccato hi-hats. Sedimentary layers of rhythm accumulate, then break apart.
Interpolating tradition with innovation, Falle Nioke infuses the familiar rhythms of his Guinean heritage with the infinite possibilities of electronic music, fortifying both in the process. At once dynamic, fluid, and grounding, Love From The Sea bounces across planes of melancholy, celebration, adoration, and joy. To follow its connecting seams would be like tracing your fingers along a restored sculpture in the dark, or trying to distinguish aged pigment from fresh paint on a restored canvas. While you could get lost in the microcosm, it’s best to stop extrapolating, take a step back, and let the music reveal itself.
