From Issue 3
Album Review: Nist Nah
Oscar Smith
Will Guthrie’s Nist Nah (2019) relies on a wide gamut of instruments from Indonesia to expand the sonic palette of his novel improvised percussion sound. The album’s six tracks alternate between intricate rhythmic systems and resonant drone textures. Although Guthrie creates a unique soundscape by combining his own musical language with gamelan instruments from Java and Bali, it would be a stretch to say that his approach synthesizes them. The album has few connections with idiomatic gamelan language, which the instrument choices might lead listeners to expect. None of this should surprise us, however. Incorporating foreign musical instruments without concern for the cultural practices in which they are embedded is by no means a novel composition exercise. This appears to have been Guthrie’s aim all along. The idea of creating music by synthesizing borrowed musical language is something that he “wouldn’t be comfortable doing under [his] own name”. As such, we’d be mistaken to measure the success of these works by their ‘authenticity’ or loyalty to gamelan music. Instead we might measure their success by the extent to which Guthrie has been true to himself.
Both its title and the fact that the album includes only a single clear reference to gamelan music, a Javanese melody on Track 6, is telling. The phrase Nist Nah was lifted from a made-up language Guthrie uses to talk to his children. This approach to creativity echoes the way Guthrie decouples Indonesian instruments from more conventional idioms. Doing so augments an individually-forged musical language and avoids mimicry or parody.
Guthrie’s ensemble (also called Nist Nah) explores a liminal space between improvisation and composition that creates a playful dynamic between spontaneous communication and moments of satisfying synchrony. A similar tactic has been taken by fellow Australian drummer Simon Barker, who uses the embodied, physicalised approach to rhythm that he learnt in South Korea to focus his own percussive language and often collaborates with Korean instrumentalists, enhancing the timbral vocabulary of the drum kit. Both performers share an improvisatory approach, the instantaneous nature of which allows them to sidestep structures often associated with the esoteric processes of academic/intellectual composition that can cloud immediate resonance with a listener.
Track 1 - Nist-Nah
This first track draws the listener’s focus with an exposition of Guthrie’s style and approach to the instrumentation at hand. It also introduces the first major ‘theme’ of the album—a dense, jittery and intricate percussive canvas—in a succinct, nascent form. According to Guthrie, the short, repetitive rhythmic phrases relate to the streams of rhythmic flow in jathilan trance music.
Track 2 - Catlike
Catlike gently familiarises us with the album’s second theme, a warm, luxuriant soundscape, highlighting the non-harmonic partial spectra of the bronze instruments through a pulsing mantra-like gender part. Shifting accents trick the listener into perceiving multiple different meters simultaneously.
Track 3 - Lit 1+2
A combination of two short, contrasting improvisations pay homage to the contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Alit. Lit 1 uses several instruments from the selonding set in Limoux owned by Mark Lockett in a reong-like “byong-byot” technique and slowly fades into a nauseous, glitchy end. The brevity of this movement communicates Guthrie’s hesitancy to make more overt references to the music he admires. Lit 2 features several multi-metric layers that phase in and out of the texture, creating a hazy impression of Alit’s cross-rhythmic language. This second movement is characterised by gores (gong scrapes) and other non-standard playing techniques.
Track 4 - Elders
Elders was inspired by the city of Surakarta, and “the idea that older people, places and things can become a part of us.” It explores the ombak tuning and octave-stretching of the selonding instruments with a backdrop of the warmer, richer colours of the theme explored in Catlike. In the background, some birdsong is just audible. The hazy drones of this piece create all but a wispy shadow of the city and the people that inspired it, reiterating Guthrie’s sensitive attitudes to appropriation and inspiration.
Track 5 - Moy Moy
Spluttering irregular rhythms drive this track forward, with tendril-like, densely layered textures matching the more frenetic qualities of tracks 1 and 3 with renewed intensity. Moy Moy was the name of Guthrie’s family’s cat. Guthrie attempts to match the sustain of the bronze instruments with the rhythmic density of the percussion parts, a tension that holds until it is completely exhausted. The irregular rhythmic lines can be linked to jathilan but are removed enough that they express their own meanings, without the elusive aural connection disrupting that communication.
Track 6 - Kebogiro Glendeng
In this arrangement of a familiar Javanese instructional piece, Guthrie creates effects similar to those achieved by Alvin Lucier using electro-acoustic means in his late 60s hallmark work “I am sitting in a room.” He does this through a gradual dissolution of the traditional melody, slowly stripping away its layers down to a ghostly silhouette of the once-recognisable tune. This is the only derivative work on the album, but it mirrors the way Guthrie internalises Indonesian music and related concepts into his own musical style. Ironically, the arrangement pays respect to Indonesian gamelan music in the only way that felt genuine to Guthrie—by reducing the instruments to their core resonances so that he can use them in a more personal way. By the time you’ve listened to the other tracks on the album, this last track is initially surprising. But as it slowly curls into incomprehensibility Guthrie demonstrates through the use of this melody that he is pursuing artistic goals different to that of ensembles who play traditional Indonesian music. Through this aural lens, listeners can come to appreciate this choice, and understand Guthrie’s sensitive artistic decisions throughout the album.
Oscar Smith
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