Nina

Nina is a Hamburg-based DJ, label owner and promoter behind the famous Hamburg Golden Pudel Club event series Nina trifft… Nina is one of the main people behind the V I S label, which she co-runs with Good News. Within the large number of mixtapes for labels such as Blackest Ever Black offshoot Krokodilo Tapes or JSMЁ Records, Nina explores the thin boundaries between industrial, drone, acoustic experimentation and proto-techno, with frequent excursions to the fields of synthwave and ambient sounds. Her live sets also burst with similar dynamics and turn venues into immersive listening chambers filled with floating sounds. Her excellent set during the 2015 edition of Unsound Krakow was described by Philip Sherburne as “steel-wool ambient”, where the punkish noise of Wolf Eyes was overlaid with Helm’s cutting-edge drone voyages. Similarly adventurous is her cassette label V I S, which has released music varying from rare Greek ethno (Greek Ethno Music Location Recordings compilation) to Basic House’s atmospheric post-industrial.

STM 256 is an ambientish trip focusing on the darker areas of the genre. It is a continuous string of monolithic hypnosis with layers delicately shifting, replacing each other with microdynamic twists and turns. The mix sounds very coherent despite the diversity of artists included, illustrating Nina’s capability to identify similar sensibilities across divergent styles, melding them together to form surprising, beautiful chimeras. The sonic surfaces have a strong sense of physicality, with each track a microworld coalescing with its surroundings. Starting from the airy pulsations of dark d’n’b masters Flxk1 & DB1, it then shifts towards a more claustrophobic mode with Deep Fridge by General Magic & Pita (where they place mics in a fridge to capture its sounds). Jonny Nash and Lindsay Todd’s collab brings some organic freshness, while Francois Bayle’s transparent transmissions remind us of the timeless Recollection GRM explorations. Due to its microscopic patterns, subtly changing surface tones and immersive/hypnotic nature, Infinite Waves by Kazuo Nakamura could serve as a good visual companion for Nina’s mix.

In the records

Nina on the mix

I’d like to thank all those wonderful musicians that made it possible for me to play this kind of music.