In the context of electronic music, crossing the sonic Rubicon to unite formerly disparate genres and styles has become a mark of high composition. As our collective community rolls through various conflicting waves of artistic stagnancy and growth, the overall motifs that we’re drawn to in music progress in tandem, and that’s most reflected in the contemporary focus on dissolving the hard lines between the sounds that catch our ears. Sitting squarely within that paradigm is Nikki Nair, an Atlanta-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, and audio engineer with a burgeoning appetite for weaving new threads between even the most incongruent of BPM’s. In an effort to concentrate his new personal discipline and exploration in production and composition, he’s launched n goes to infinity, a creative label with an expansive focus on music outside the comfortable lines of the traditional wheelhouse.
Nikki’s early years within the space of electronic music were dominated by a hardware-centric and DIY approach to electronic production, zeroed in on the lane of steady-beat techno and house music. In time, he’d be exposed to what is often considered the inverse world of broken-beat bass music. Finding clarity amidst the parallel influences of minimalist production elements and progressive, maximalist sound design is already its own hill to climb, but it comes with parallel challenges in the social sphere. No historical music scene is without its natural guardrails; umbrella genre’s dictate the overall feel of the music in question, and the subsequent sub-genres dictate the terms on which that feeling is met in context. Ostensibly, sub-genres tend to propagate tight-knit communities and scenes of like-minded revelers, and the old paradigm involved rarely, if ever, crossing those imaginary boundary lines. Once you found your people, and your sound, the next natural step was to sit tight and hold the flag atop your hill. While there’s no good moment to point to where the dissolution of that old paradigm began to reach a terminal velocity, Nikki’s experience coming into his late adolescence and adulthood within various iterations of musical communities gives him a perspective with a swivel.
Cracking into Nikki’s background and motivations for both his own unique project and n goes to infinity unravels a rich tapestry of influence and a vibrant vantage point on how to best shape the abandonment of hard genre separation. As such, The Rust felt it pertinent to dive into his thoughts, musical processes, and perspectives on where we’ve come from and where we may be going.
The Rust: So how did you find your way into electronic production in the first place?
Nikki Nair: 2012 is around when I started actively participating. The scene I found were people who were really into Jeff Mills, Underground Resistance, and even the more “EBM” sort of goth/industrial stuff. Yea, I think when I started making proper dance music, I was also in this scene of people who were really into hardware, so it was a lot of doing shows with drum machines and synths. So I got really into finding cheap production and hardware gear to make “hardware techno” and similar stuff. That workflow carried over into what I’m doing now, where I still like having real outside-the-computer sound sources, or processing through analog channels, or recorded instruments. Now, I’ve just become a nerd about audio engineering, so it all feeds off of itself.
The Rust: How do you find your own marriage between the American bass music movement and its dance-floor oriented cousins?
Nikki: It feels like the rave and club oriented scene (where you normally hear house, techno, and breaks) is almost completely separate from the bass music scene in the US. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons for this, but I'm also sure that there are many people from each scene that love music from the other and just don't get to play tracks from the other side.
I think on the bass-music side, part of this is because rave-oriented music is usually quite simple/functional and doesn't focus too much on sound design, and so wouldn't sound that engaging in the middle of a complex and intricate bass music set. Similarly, the half-time energy of a lot of bass music makes it tough to play in a situation where you are trying to maintain forward momentum on a dancefloor. I really want to be able to play music from both sides of and find ways to combine these scenes because I think there is some really exciting, uncharted musical territory in between.
The Rust: When did you first begin to envision n goes to infinity as a sort of bridge between those camps? How did it first come to mind?
Nikki: It was kind of a moment of clarity. I'd certainly had the dream of having a label for a while, but did not want to start a label just to start one. I'd been playing bass music in my dance sets for a while, and also making tracks that sat in between. When I realized many of these in-between tracks I made couldn't get signed to either bass music labels or club labels, I realized I had to start the label.
It was pretty recently, really in the last couple of years, that I noticed that the sort of scene I come from, the house/techno/dancefloor oriented stuff, we really missed a lot of the bass music developments. All I knew of it was that we would sometimes play our parties in the side rooms of those parties. We wouldn’t even go in; I remember G Jones was playing at one of those parties, and I thought it was some “dubstep guy” and wasn’t interested. We just did our thing outside instead, and now I love G Jones! I wish I had just taken the chance and stood in there!
I came from wanting to just make Acid Techno with just a Roland TB-303, like literally just a TB-303 and a tape machine and that was it. Now, I want to find a way to bridge the gap as much as possible. There’s amazing music coming from both angles, and I want my label to be a space where I and others can draw from both perspectives. When I release on techno labels, It’s much more difficult to squeeze a half-time drop in the middle of a track and have it go over well with those ears. Or some of the more ridiculous sound design in bass music, that’s not very popular in the more clubby, rave-oriented side of things, where there’s a focus on the simplistic, hardware-driven sounds.
The Rust: What’s your perception on the evolution of genre spread and intersection of the people at the ground floor of these scenes?
Nikki: It seems like there’s a new generation of kids who didn’t grow up seeing such a distinct rift between scenes; they probably found this stuff on the internet and that was that. They don’t really acknowledge the separation, musically. Part of what kept these scenes separate involves ethos and intent. A lot of the parties I went to coming up were “political”, or maybe poticially charged, in that they were dominated by the queer and BIPOC communities. If you went to a dubstep party in the same area, the queer scene didn’t have that same kind of embrace or representation.
But that’s changing fast, and now you have people like Wreckno, who are able to take that representation and foist it onto this huge platform, and merge whatever styles of music fit for the moment while reaching out to bigger and more diverse groups of people.
It seems like everyone wants dance music to be for everyone, and I don’t think bass music is a place just filled with straight white dudes, that is just a perception. That was my perception. Now, I realize how many people from so many different backgrounds are involved in all this new musical exploration, and it makes me realize that there can be bigger safe spaces. Parties can be both big and safe at the same time.
The Rust: If the proliferation of dancefloor rhythms with a stark focus on sound design and engineering is the goal, how do you intend to use n goes to infinity as a platform?
Nikki Nair: Right now, I'm simply releasing music that hopefully fits this bill. In the future, I'd like to find new things to do, but I'm playing everything by ear. It really feels like things are changing in electronic music right now, and my main intention is to find ways to facilitate that change and try to make it change for the better.
I like to think I can’t predict it; I can only hope that something new comes out of it. I can only say what I’m doing concretely, and what I hope that brings. This year I’ll be focusing on my own releases through the label, with the goal of being able to lift up other, niche artists in the following year. I want it to be as fresh as can be, and supportive of everyone who falls outside the usual lines of the music that we’re all into.
The attraction to formally taboo crossovers and combinations both in the mix and in the studio has become increasingly palatable in recent years, and it feels indicative of a sort of positive ouroboros of influence. Artists like Nikki Nair tap directly on the pulse of that movement, energizing it through the marriage of dueling creative perspectives. With the launch of n goes to infinity, he’s taking point at the head of a new congress of beatfreaks and speaker creatures across the parallel hemispheres of electronic music.
FOLLOW Nikki Nair: SoundCloud / Bandcamp / Spotify / Webpage
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