NaGUST:

Technobabble

Not two days within the process of writing the review for NaGUST’s People EP, I receive a message from her containing a link to her latest piece of work: Technobabble, a single from which called “Ehyeh” was readily available shortly before its release. Why you’d devote a whole single to an EP, I’m not quite sure, but hey, to its credit, it is indeed the most single-worthy track on this thing. I’ll get more into that later.

Technobabble is another EP in a very long line of EPs from NaGUST—and though there have been at least three LPs released during her MoonSpeak days, we have yet to see any full-length albums released under her current moniker. Instead, we’ve been treated to a four-part EP gauntlet—which is not to say they’ve all been terrible; I happened to enjoy The Feautures, but I can’t help but feel that we’ve been regressing a little bit since then.

Trioxide, for me, left much to be desired (even to her own admission), and her last EP I felt was quite mediocre, but after giving this new EP number of listens, I’ve concluded that it is… pretty okay. It’s a cut above her last EP, in that a couple of the tracks (not all, though) seem to be crafted pretty meticulously and in a much more intriguing way—and I simply think the songs are slightly better overall.

We return again to NaGUST’s penchant for sampling snippets of speech from seemingly haphazard sources—not a habit I'm huge on, but at one point, an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech can be heard on the final track, “Aneb-Hetch”, repeated over a particular squealing crowd loop that actually sounds a little unsettling, given that the rest of the track is rather melodic in dissonance.

Given the EP’s title, the politically-charged samples, and the esoteric song titles, some themes of the value of technological advancement are present within some tracks (or maybe I'm just pulling that out of my ass). Take the second track, “Cointelpro”. We have a sampling of the narrator from a Cold War-era defense film called Atomic Alert, which was shown to schoolchildren, providing them what would have been the best steps to take during a nuclear crisis.

However, musically, I feel like these samples tend to overshadow the instrumentals in such a way that it felt like NaGUST was trying to give weight to a song that didn’t have enough on its own—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (obviously, taking away the vocals to a song is going to take away its meaning), but in this case especially, the samples feel very contrived, lofty, and maybe a little bit pretentious. I’m not sure if some overarching message is present on this EP that would link together the atomic bit and the Dr. King bit, but if there is, it’s tenuous at best, and I just wasn’t really feeling it.

What I was feeling, however, was the single off of this thing—“Ehyeh”. I honestly thought it was a pretty great track for NaGUST. It features one of the most layered and detailed soundscapes she’s ever composed thus far, creating this chilled, snowy atmosphere as a reversed vocal whispers nothings into my headphones. It’s just the perfect song to kick back and relax to, and has proven once again to be NaGUST’s strongsuit. Definitely the highlight of this project.

As was the case with her last EP, each song here is of a digestible length, though we still have tiny issues here and there where a song fades out either too early or too abruptly—“Ipanema” being a perfect example, despite being a slightly above-average track for her otherwise.

If I can be honest, I grow weary of all these EPs. I won’t pressure NaGUST into something she may not be ready to do just yet, but if I were to make a humble request, I think it’s high-time for her to take a more ambitious step—I wanna see a debut LP. She has the foundation going, and all of her previous EPs (this one included) have at least one or two gems. If she studied what makes her best tracks work and builds further upon them, I have confidence that she’d put together a strong oeuvre.

This EP, while marginally preferable to her last, was clearly just yet another indolent experiment. It’s not quite as bold or as intriguing as some of her previous material has been. Though I appreciate that steps have been taken to improve upon her music’s general aesthetic and finesse (even the cover art has been improving greatly), it’s still lacking in the department of keeping my interest or intrigue for very long. If I wasn’t reviewing this thing, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second listen—let alone a fifth, or sixth, or however many I actually gave it. There’s just very little about it that I could possibly get too excited over, and it's kind of a shame, because I'm hearing some decent stuff.

I hear the potential—but I’ve been hearing potential for quite a while now. It’s still dormant.

6/10