Moiré patterns are peculiar optical effects that occur when similar sets of lines or patterns are superposed onto each other. The same process is behind the wavy rainbow patterns that appear in photos sometimes. Relatedly, moiré is a term applied in textiles to describe rippled finishes. The word originates in the French for “watered”. The suggestion that something fixed is starting to behave like a liquid.
Audible moiré patterns ripple through the music of Dmytro Nikolaienko. On ‘Belated Procession I’, the first track on his fourth album, Love-Fidelity or Hiss Goodbye, bass guitar struts out of a whirling miasma. Metallophones sparkle through long-tailed delays. Saxophone gently unwinds. The tape-looped components forming new patterns as they drape over each other. Similar instruments populate ‘Belated Procession II’, but here loops stumble rather than shimmy, clumsy motion becomes a pulse all its own. On ‘Love-Fidelity’, a flute is bent to the extent it becomes owl-like, while percussive hits begin to chirrup. Throughout Nikolaienko’s compositions, fluctuating echoes and loops layered at odd angles spark aural myodesopsias.
The Ukrainian sound-artist and a founder of the Muscut label, now based in Tallinn, Estonia, works with tape and acoustic instruments, recording samples from the latter on to the former then looping them back through the tape machine’s quirks and idiosyncrasies. Where previous albums saw him largely work alone, on Love-Fidelity or Hiss Goodbye Nikolaienko samples (or borrows as he describes it) playing from other musicians on the Muscut roster, Ganna Bryzhata (aka Bryozone), Memotone and Mykola Lebed, on bass, clarinet and flute, and saxophone respectively. It gives the music a greater depth and oomph than his previous works, while also allowing what Nikolaienko does with a tape machine and effects to shine through more clearly. The result is a dubby, almost motorik zone somewhere between sci-fi lounge jazz and crumpled exotica.
Tape is a perennially popular tool in ‘experimental’ music, but Nikolaienko doesn’t take its texture as an end in itself. He goes beyond the routine performed in a million bedrooms of playing tape back at the wrong speed and hoping something divine will happen. But he’s also a far cry from the abrupt cuts and jolts of someone like Aaron Dilloway. Where Dilloway amplifies the clunky stop/start interface of an analogue tape machine, Nikolaienko seems transfixed by the whirl of the spools. Even when things are wobbliest, off-kilter circular momentum remains.
Nikolaienko’s samples are in many ways quite traditionally musical, and music doused in the surface noise of tape and echo is far from unusual. But he conjures a shimmering, unfamiliar quality as these familiar components entangle. Different to the sum of its components, Love-Fidelity or Hiss Goodbye splashes and ripples with the consistency of liquid.
