Naw

Niel Adam Wiernik (aka Naw) is known equally as a laptop musician and as a curator for Vague Terrain, a quarterly electronic arts journal. Naw’s work exists on two very distinct levels: the digital plane — philosophical and in some ways, untouchable — and the physical plane, which takes the form of events where sound creates the environment and the bass shakes the room. Neil’s music has always taken from dub sensibilities but City Saturate is perhaps his most dub-influenced record yet, with similar sounds and themes running through a number of the tracks, which become versions of one another, creating a meditative, aural space. The aerial photograph of a non-descript city as the cover artwork, designed by Serial Consign, can be viewed as a metaphor for Niel’s sound — inside of the grid-like structure of streets is an intricate world of corners and alleyways, of reverb and green spots of echo. Tomas Jirku provides a dance-friendly version of "5 am west bound” but the rest of the album is more a pleasant day in the city rather than a feverish night out on the town. With City Saturate, Naw has distilled his aural activity into a deeper, more delicate ambient dub-techno soundscape, one in line with the more advanced material from ~scape records in Berlin.