Listen: Nondi_ – Flood City Trax

Music accretes like sediment on a floodplain. Layers are disturbed, reconstituted, remixed in the cyclical tumult of the flood. New sounds emerge from old, surprising vegetation, useful weeds. But the flood, always again the flood, is also a time of loss / loss of time. A carving away. An act of curation.

Every year or so I pack up everything I own and move to a new apartment. The rent goes up. A tornado blows through the trailer park. A call center closes. My girlfriend gets a new job in a new town. I’ve been doing this shit my whole life.

My studio is always the first and last thing to go in boxes. The center of my necessarily portable life: computer, mixer,  interface, a few small synths and pedals, my bass. It goes in bits and pieces, a carving away, a curation. I sell my bass amp for significantly less than it’s worth. I think about all the old gear I’ll never see again. I look at a used Boss DR-202 online, knowing I won’t buy it. I think about the noise I used to coax from the one I left behind in the aftermath of a messy divorce. The flood is a time of loss. You get the point of the repetition by now. The loop. The flood. Everybody gets it eventually.

Regularity of disturbance is an invitation to ritual. Profane time starts to crack, and whatever lives on the other side of its surface bleeds through. The levee breaks. The whole town floods. Loss. Repetition. The loop. You get it by now, but it keeps happening anyway. The flood doesn’t care if you understand what it means.

I’ve been listening to Flood City Trax while I pack, letting the album’s ghosts mingle with my own.  Crackling synths, cardboard boxes, distant breaks fading into dust-limned silence. Sunlight glints from a wavering reflection of Johnstown, Pennsylvania—the town’s history and future of floods. Nondi_’s latest release probes this cycle of loss even as it sediments the possibility of something new, floodplain weeds that syncopate through soil, seed leaves wet with reverb.