Reviews

Key Magazine

NQ’s „Inscription“ is an almost perfect example for laptop experiments between Click’n’Cuts, Ambient and Hip Hop. NQ’s instrumental pieces combine state-of-the-art soundesign, splintered breakbeats, sunny pads and noisy fieldrecordings with such an organic quality, that the listener is left speechless. It’s  nearly a little sad, that „Inscription“ which is release by the sheffield-based experimental label Audiobulb is only available as a digital-download-only album, as it deserves all possible interest. It shows, that laptop nerd music isn’t per se something for the emotionally depraved – the contrary.

sound 10 out of 10 / music 10 out of 10

Opak Magazine

NQ is Nils Quak and his sound landscapes. Crackles, brooding drones, that end up in ecstatic rave happiness and melancholic sunrises in solitude. This is musical onomatiopoesis, that sounds like a reflection of somebody’s fucked up everyday life. It sounds like trying to break out of this structures, by assembling pieces that genuinely allow to escape those surroundings. An escape into sound, a jungle of scattered noise. I’m touched.

Boomkat

Last seen on the Progressive Form album, NQ now donates some skillfully pieced together electronica for the Audiobulb label. Inscription gets underway with a fairly low key beginning, sculpting some nebulous ambience on 'Glonn' before scalpel-like incisions carve out precise micro-beats during 'Sentomin'. You can hear the legacy of classic IDM stalwarts feeding into this material, and the sound designs of 'Ferrum Velvet' in particular make for a pretty convincing replication of the sort of complex noises Funkstorung were conjuring up during their prime. Similarly, 'Silent Receiver' is masterfully produced and a real spa treatment for the ears of anyone who still gives LP5 and Chiastic Slide regular spins.

Vital Weekly

Two new albums from two different labels, proves that the post-Autechre-era is still going strong. First album  comes from the Cologne-based artist Niels Quak operating under the obvious project-name NQ. Present album is the first on UK-label Audiobulb, but a few releases from the artist has come out on labels such as Kitty Yo and Progressive Form. The album titled "Inscription" is a very satisfying work drifting somewhere between ambient, IDM and glitch-textures. The compositions are often built on noisy sub-layers of clicking microbeats meanwhile the upper layers have been occupied by atmospheric and quite beautiful soundspheres. Sometimes more conventional breakbeat-textures, adding a nice dynamism in the music, shines through. Despite the quite personal approach to the clicks'n'cuts-style, associations towards Autechre, circa the "Chiastic slide"-period, appears on the album. A very nice combination of rhythmic complexity and melodic soundscapes on this album. Next album comes in a very nice package. The album is released as a limited edition in a milky white Stiplex CD-case. On the musical side we find ourselves in similar spheres as the aforementioned album, meaning abstract IDM and clicks 'n'cuts. Compared to the work of NQ the Israel-based artist Yvat, finds himself in even stranger and less listen- friendly soundspheres compared to the aforementioned NQ-project, but never the less a quite interesting sound experience. Melody is almost non-existing on the album titled "Gliae". The emphasis are put on hypercomplex rhyhtmic textures and wide ranging spectres of strange sounds bouncing in and out. Staying in the comparison to the sound of Autechre-vein, the album from Yvat has more associations pointing towards the earliest period around "Amber" and "Incunabula". Interesting album, though people searching for the more melodic and listen- friendly approach to the abstract glitch-scene should go for the NQ-release. 

Textura

Inscription's opening track begins with showers of whirr and click before throbbing micro-beat rumble and understated glimmers of melody connect the dots. Sound familiar? Yep, Cologne-based artist Nils Quak (NQ) would appear to be a seeming Autechre devotee of long standing, given how strongly his twelve-track album evokes the Warp duo's Chiastic Slide-LP5-EP7  period. It's with the arrival of the third piece, “Sometimes I Feel Strange,” that the influence comes most nakedly to the fore, in particular when a minimal bass motif appears to anchor the electrical fluttering that restlessly billows around it. Inscription  includes enough complex beats, intricate sound design, and silken synth melodies to keep fans of classic IDM and glitchy electronica listening, but Quak also wisely adds a few new colours to the genre palette—hints of soulfulness during “Silent Receiver,” for one, and a well-considered and balanced handling of the material, for another. “And On Some Other Night” imbues its mid-tempo languor with a dreamy hip-hop-styled swing that's seductive, no matter the genre category, while the breakbeat funk of “Cashier Desk” likewise proves ear-catching. While it may not win any awards for innovation or originality, Inscription nevertheless impresses as a well-shaped and satisfying example of its genre type. Intricate but not burdened by over-complexity, the album is tailor-made for fans of Spezial Material, Benbecula, and, of course, late-‘90s Warp.

The Silent Ballet

NQ is the alias of Nils Quak, an electronic artist from Cologne, Germany, who, like many of his contemporaries, wields the potent processing forces in the unlikeliest of musical instruments: the laptop. After a period of label drifting, Quak now resides at the Sheffield-based electronica-focused Audiobulb where he hosts his new LP, Inscription. Quak is partial to the practice of resampling, running samples and processed bits through his laptop and churning them out in newly synthesized arrangements and patterns. Fiddling with layer after layer of computer -processed sonic impressions, Quak through Inscription sets out to identify and exemplify the many facets of one stylised subset of electronica.

As with most other electronic artists, Quak places the bulk of his focus on the assemblage and arrangement of samples over authoring melodic inputs, but the overemphasis and overworking of this criterion forms an imbalance that leaves an almost improvised finish to the end result. The tones, clicks, whirrs and glitches all assume the starring role on Inscription, rendering each piece a simple variation on the matter of how and in what rhythmic matter they choose to be present. The blatant IDM textures generated by Quak make frequent descriptive references to the Warp family inevitable, but somehow Inscription struggles to live up to the provocative artistic punch of a Boards of Canada or Autechre work. While a comparison to such giants isn’t particularly fair and perhaps sees Quak out of his depth, it is still suitably indicative of his rough whereabouts on the radar.

Opener “Sentomin” serves as a good example of Quak lining up a trajectory that is slowly approaching some serious Boards of Canada territory, as does the later “Ferrum Velvet”. “Sometimes I Feet Strange” strings together the clicks and clacks in a more thumping arrangement, while “Silent Receiver” has warm, fluctuating albeit oddly-placed tones that really provide a contrast to the prevalent glitchy effects of the sound work. “And On Some Other Night” carries a steady-paced beat that melodically retains a clickity timbre but arranges it into a piece befitting of the hip hop spectrum. The remainder of Inscription pretty much falls comfortably—perhaps even too comfortably —within the bounds of precedent club-friendly IDM arrangements, with the exception of “Calw” which comes close to setting itself apart to be of higher maturity.

A key gimmick Quak professes about his music is the art of incorporating everyday mundane sounds into a sonically aesthetic context, but somehow these efforts fall a little flat, at best seemingly fascinating and at worst only mildly stimulating. The thought of sampling various re-appropriated un-music-like sounds to undertake an artistic purpose is intriguing, but putting this into practice on Inscription, there is a feeling that Quak may have over processed a lot of these inputs, some just a tad and some beyond recognition. The samples are lost within a sea of computerized effects, with perhaps the closer “Some Times” being the only real discernible delve into the mission statement of sample re-appropriation. They are lost quite willfully in a rhythmic display, allowing a pleasant transcendence to take place but still yearning for a sense of natural instinct.

Quak occasionally flirts his IDM shenanigans with hints of sound art, but the more accessible, borderline-club beats are never really left out of the picture. In fact, the prominent IDM textural backdrop tends to neglect any sign of a truly intuitive liberated sensibility. Quak appears a little too predisposed with the practical applications of working the samples and refining the sonic constructions that along the way, he loses a chunk of ambient electronica’s connectedness and intuition. While Inscription is a fair and versatile effort from Quak in illuminating his skills in piecing together rhythms from effects, it ultimately falls short of being anything artistically remarkable.