Nickolas Mohanna: Mantis tape (Preservation, 2016)
May 5, 2016 at 7:04 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Nickolas Mohanna: Mantis tape
Five years after his excellent CD
Reflectors, New York’s Nickolas Mohanna returns to the Australian label Preservation with this incredible tape called
Mantis. The album starts out with dazzling synth arpeggios, and it would be awesome if that’s all it were, but he takes it way further than that, adding cymbals, found sounds, city noises, eerie voices, acoustic instruments, sampled tapes and vinyl, and a plethora of other enchanting sounds. It just keeps going further, deeper and more haunted. Forgotten records melt away, guitars singe and simmer, and it almost sounds like there’s some Laraaji-inspired zither or dulcimer action going on. Each side plays as a continuous collage/dream, and it’s easy to get immersed/lost in this ever-shifting, curious sound world. Mohanna has been doing some truly amazing, impressive things for a while now, everything I’ve heard by him so far as been amazing. This tape, and this artist, deserve attention.
The Answer Is In The Beat 
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