Back in the early nineties as the second summer of love drew its hedonistic acid curtains and the dark dense noise of trip hop and dub of acts such as Aphex Twin, Portishead and Massive Attack reigned it look liked the future was electronic. It wasn’t hard to envisage a world where the laptop ruled, the guitar merely subservient. However the luddite resistance of grunge and brit-pop put pay to that; and as the noughties come to a close we look back at a decade where the way music is recorded, promoted, distributed and sold has changed massively, but the music itself hasn’t. From the rising of The Strokes and The White Stripes who passed the baton to The Libertines and a host of second generation indie Brit-Pop bands through to the Arctic Monkeys, music in many parts has become a traditionalist art form rather than a progressive one. There has of course been a backlash this year with synth pop standing hairspray tall, but even much of this has had an incredibly in for the kill revivalist feel.
Which brings us neatly to Nedry . Nedry at the very least sound like the future. Take the heavily haunting A42. Full of dubstep shuddering, ghostly vocals and erratic twitching beats its electrified earshot stands out - the soundtrack of modern day dreams and nightmares. Whatever your view on dubstep, one has to acknowledge that it is one of the most influential new genres to appear this decade, now heavily influencing the mainstream. Whilst Nedry may take elements of dubstep in their sound, certainly not everything they do can be classified under a simple genre heading, their music is refreshingly more inventive than that.
Nedry are a three piece from London consisting of Matt and Chris on keyboards and guitars and Ayu on vocals, loop station and percussion. They make dark sparse electronica formed out a warped late night ambience. Their sound can be discovered on their download album Condors. Here you will find Apples and Pears which takes a soft pastoral guitar line then threads and stitches light beats and a soft focus lullaby Bjork-ish vocal to create something quite floaty and water like, before a midnight meditative bass kicks in. Where The Dead Birds Go is a short devilishly ambient industrial piece, the sound of a giant punching at sound waves. Then there’s Swan Ocean, a track which is formed from a music box of sounds and sharp beats overlain with a voice that is spectral and spacey. It’s all rather good stuff and has been picked up by Huw Stephens on Radio 1 and Tom Robinson of BBC 6 Music.
With their current body of work Nedry are never going to enter the mainstream. However for those who think that standing in a field with eighty thousand people singing Sex On Fire is a living hell and that music should at least attempt to do something original, then a relationship with Nedry could be a beautiful thing.
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