Nic Krog - Reproaching the Absurd (2025)

“Reproaching the Absurd” is the solo debut album by Misantrop, Danish born and Berlin based Nicolai Vesterkær Krog, and their first appearance on Opal Tapes.

The pieces on “Reproaching the Absurd” mark Misantrop’s first work focussed heavily on voice and lyrics. The confessional nature of their work challenging a listening audiences preconceptions and the artists own neuroses and sensitivities. As a result of this stymied method the pieces on 'Reproaching the Absurd" have been formed slowly over the previous 3 years. Taking their time to hone a final work, resolutely queer in its approach to form and category, this is a music indeterminately grasping at club culture and sound art equally, finding both worlds shaking in the field before scything down and baking the harvest together into beautifully fermented shapes.

Lyrically exploring the thought processes of a depressed mind in Berlin’s club scene, observing different mental stages of a night and following day - existential dread, anxiety, desire, regret. Opener 'The Latent Image' is a unreal ball of snaking abacus bead percussions and bass band flex. Krog's voice alerting us to the situation/s ahead. The track growing with a odd coloured dread as it's consumed by distantly mic'd sax wreckage. 'Homebound' utilises headphone/microphone equipment engineered by the legendary Christina Kubisch. Their deployment creating dense information fields of lashing harmonics and LED-panel headaches. 'Body Control' follows this density with an immediate purge. Its reverberant bass blobs and extreme focus pulled toward the empty space inside the body. The album closes with 'Lingering Transgression', a final suite of vertiginous scope which plies an intense paranoia against a delirious ever climbing vine of sound, it's mid-range trepanning the previous nights movements out of your memory bank.

The new album at once expands and refines Misantrop’s genre-defying and idiosyncratic approach which began with the 2016 debut EP “Limerence” followed by the “Present Tense” album by duo project Glass Knot, both out on the artist’s own Foul-Up imprint. More recently, the artist has been heard joining forces with Splash Pattern for a collaborative self-released EP and an appearance on fledgling Copenhagen label Petrola 80’s latest compilation. The artist’s focus on live performance and improvisation explorations in recent years, has for instance lead to presenting a unique project at Berlin’s renowned KW Institute for Contemporary Art in spring 2020.