Nickolas Mohanna: "Gishiki"

The best thing about carrying out heavy duty electrical works is the music, hands down. But, as any good sparky will tell you, there’s only so many times you can play your go-anywhere Madness tape before the urge to commit pranks consumes you, resulting in either a ban from site or paralysis and missing fingertips (or, if you’re really unlucky, a Revenge of the Tradesmen involving cable ties, your anus, and the staff of the Daily Mirror building). For this reason it’s important that electricians meditate, and that’s where Nickolas Mohanna comes in, flitting through stacks of polyphase transformers like the four-foot hillbilly from Poltergeist. He’s been making his name through industrial-tinged contributions to a host of ambient samplers for years, but now he’s been given his own show, courtesy of Nottingham drone crew Low Point. It’s not the first time the city has recruited an American to add some shazam to its profile—folk still remember the good work Mr Costner did when he stabbed Alan Rickman in the nineties.

There’s a more recent history lesson at work on “Gishiki,” though: a lesson that features an electrical storm, a kite, the eighteenth century and capacitors. Opening with enough static charge to perm Benjamin Franklin, Mohanna fades in some world music tones before invoking a storm of white noise. “World music?” yelps a terrified Benjamin F, his perm shooting upwards in fright. Fortunately it’s held back from the realms of Peter Gabriel by waves of mind-bending synthesisers, warm and lit up like Christmas. This is electrical behaviour in its simplest form: just protons, neutrons, blue light, and you, your world aglow like petted plasma balls. It’s Mohanna’s background in sound design that keeps the track’s edges undefined (there’s a sense of fragility throughout that says “flinch once and you’re charcoal”), but otherwise “Gishiki” is a mellow rush, and one which belies the odd choice of title that makes it sound like a sneeze.