- PVAS and Florian T M Zeisig make impressively murky ambient music on their second album as NUG.
- On NUG's second album, Bong Boat, the air is thick with insect buzz and bird chatter. Soupy phasers and filters are made so dense they seem to lap against speakers like the tannin-dyed waters of a mangrove swamp. Films like Apocalypse Now and Aguirre, the Wrath of God come to mind, with protagonists paddling deeper into the jungle and becoming dwarfed by the immensity of the universe around them. One might imagine the German duo, made up of Jordan Juras and Florian T M Zeisig, writing an album like this in some remote Amazonian outpost, nudging files around on their laptops under mosquito nets. The impression of tropical malaise is so thick that it might come as a surprise to learn they actually conceived the album in the German countryside, during a trip to rural Bavaria.
NUG's 2022 debut, Napping Under God, was teeming with rosy keyboard presets and sharply mixed drums. Bong Boat, by contrast, submerges nearly everything in low-end filth. Breakbeats show up every now and then, but they're so filtered they sound like hand drums, or like the Baka water drumming samples on Jon Hassell's Dream Theory in Malaya. This has little to do with club music—it’s more like mangled lounge music—yet the duo manage to maintain a sense of momentum across these nine tracks, leaving the listener drifting serenely with the tide. Many of these tracks are based on repeated samples that bring a consistent rhythmic logic to the album's loose aquatones, including a sequencer pattern on "Row" and what sounds like a clipped sample of a war horn on "Kneippen."
Although Bong Boat clocks in at just under 40 minutes, it sounds longer than it is. In music that goes to such lengths to create an impression of humidity and stoned laziness, that's an advantage. The first seven tracks are around three or four minutes apiece, while the last two stretch over seven minutes each. "Drift," the first of the two closing tracks, suggests the sentimental sweep of "Pop 5" by GAS, whose acid-fueled adventures in Königsforst, a nature reserve in Cologne, provided the inspiration for frightening ambient psychedelia in 1998. (The German countryside seems to unlock a fearful awareness of nature in those who visit it, especially in tandem with drugs). "Night," meanwhile, is all chirping birds and distant flute samples, recorded by Juras and Zeisig in a Bavarian cave.
Though some of the chords swimming at the bottom of the murk are gorgeous in a deep-house sort of way, the predominant feeling on Bong Boat is paranoia: that the trees are filled with eyes watching you, that you'd best be on your guard. No wonder the duo released it on West Mineral, the American label that's turned druggy and ominous ambient music into a small empire; it fits right alongside releases like Pendant's Make Me Know You Sweet and Mister Water Wet’s Bought the Farm while possessing a ripe fecundity of its own. Those looking for a luxe and comfortable experience can look towards Napping Under God or Zeisig’s Music for Parents, but those unafraid to get a little dirty could do worse than to roll up their pant legs and wade in.
Tracklist01. Row
02. Kneippen
03. Tide
04. Mud
05. Sky
06. Hull
07. Heat
08. Drift
09. Night