Nick Storring - Newfoundout (2021)

Nick Storring's seventh album is a chiming, psychedelic miracle, sounding like an orchestra pit rolling down a hill in the best possible ways. Bells, plucked strings, flutes and hyperreal percussion is fashioned into a snowball of sound that just keeps growing and growing.

Using strictly acoustic and electromechanical instruments and only the smallest amount of processing, 'Newfoundout' is a remarkable achievement, with the overall character of the sound vibrating closer to jazz than electronic music. Storring's expertise is in allowing each sound to rub up against the other in ways that suggest electronic treatment without relying on it. If you're not listening carefully, 'Dome' might sound like experimental drone or mangled generative glitches, but tune your senses and you'll hear a room full of drums, Benjamin Britten-esque woodwind, faerie bells and who knows what else.

The entire album has a soundtrack-esque quality, but not the overdone sci-fi score or vintage synth horror take. "Newfoundout" instead sounds like the accompaniment to an ambitious opium-blasted musical set in the late 18th century. It's lavish and florid, but completely bonkers simultaneously. We're sold.