Nico Niquo - Timeless (2018)

Presenting Timeless by Nico Niquo, an album written, produced and mixed by Nico Callaghan, to be released on 26th of September, 2018. The first edition of 150, black 12-inch vinyl with printed insert available with limited copies of Snakes in the Grass, a non-fiction text examining Ambient music’s evolution in the modern cultural landscape, written concurrent to the record.

Timeless sees Nico Niquo’s stylistic explorations converge at an unexpected, but long hidden reference point, Jazz-Fusion. Delivering an impassioned album that reconciles the peculiar situation of modern “Australian” music, certain touchstones are reworked into a haze of bent New Age mannerisms and Ambient passages strung together with a pairing of Dub-Techno impulse and Impressionist musings.

However, in retaining an emphasis upon hyperreal sonic landscapes, Nico has crafted a new environment for his electronic inquiries to be re-characterised into mediated form within a bizarro-Jazz realm.

With the novel presence of saxophonist and childhood friend Jared Becker, Nico’s forays into the vast lineage of Jazz synthesise and re-interpret all manner of gestures: Strayhorn’s blue moods and sardonic exoticism, Miles Davis’ proto-ambient extended sessions, and the ECM rosters’ explorations into funk, minimalism, and improvisation. The album is titled in part in acknowledgement of the late John Abercrombie's’ Timeless.

Puzzlement at an overabundance of gestures and signals with limitless opportunity sees Nico re-focus attention toward considering a personal alternative – one that pays due homage to Jazz and its influence on his music but moves distinctly away from many of its assumed leanings. Timeless is a significant shift from Nico’s earlier work but demonstrates an eagerness to let naturally evolve the possibilities of the project from its foundations.