NONKEEN - ALL GOOD?

Released: 21/06/2024

Comprising Nils Frahm, Frederic Gmeiner, and Sebastian Singwald, Nonkeen’s third LP, following the critically acclaimed pair of 2016 albums, The Gamble and Oddments of the Gamble, is yet more of the trio’s seamless blend of jazz-adjacent electro-organic ambient music, built around marimbas, glocks, and aquatic-sounding Rhodes keyboards. Perhaps a better description is ‘ice psych’ – a term I’ve invented for a music that shares a lineage with desert psych (think America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’) in the way it engenders in the listener a feeling of being on a long, nomadic journey, but instead of conjuring a prairie landscape of scrub, grassland, sand and clay, brings to the imagination glaciers, ice-capped mountains and hyper-fecund vegetation. This is not so much a music for airports as it is music for a mindful hike through a Norwegian fjord: a soundtrack to expand the mind and contemplate one’s place in nature’s grand scheme.