Two Spheres of Music: Nihiloxica Interview

pq of Nihiloxica discusses debut LP Kaloli and the group’s unique sound, a mix of the hypnotic repetition of Bugandan drumming with abstract techno

Experimental dance music practitioners Nihiloxica refer to their cross-pollination of sounds – where Bugandan drum workouts meet abstract industrial bangers – as traditional techno. The term may suggest a technological hierarchy, but on the evidence of their debut LP Kaloli for Crammed Discs, the boundaries between past, present and future are determinedly fluid. Rather like the man-machine of Robocop, the percussion is augmented by electronics rather than controlled by them. Kaloli is thus an explosive, expressive set of heavy hitters suitable for open-minded dancefloors and turbulent inner space home listening.

Nihiloxica member pq spoke to me about traditional techno, the logistics of their international collaboration, extreme metal influences and more.

Please introduce yourself. 

Hey, I’m Pete Jones, my alias is pq. I play synth in Nihiloxica, and I make beats and drones under my alias, too.

Hope you’re doing okay in these worrying times. What is lockdown life like for you and is there any music that is helping you get by? 

Lockdown for me is OK. I can be quite solitary at the best of times, but this is way too long for that! I’ve moved back in with my mum as I’m technically homeless, and have been keeping as busy as possible with other projects. Obviously we can’t do much with Nihiloxica as we’re a live band, and nothing really works when we’re not all in a room together! 

I’ve been doing some mixes so digging for a lot of music which has kept me going! Really into 160bpm UK-flavoured dance music at the mo – labels like Astrophonica, Exit Records and Hoover Sounds are really creating a sick little niche of crossover sounds that really gets my juices flowing.

The world has been turned upside down and if anything, things seem to be getting worse. Although there are glimmers of hope through positive protest that might point to a redefined future. What can be done within musical communities to try and make the post-lockdown world a better place?

I think music can be a real force for change in the world. Within our band we don’t really have words to create a message, but we try to embody the change we want to see. I think that the world needs to recognise African voices on a much deeper level, be that in music, on a social level, and in terms of global politics too. By making the music that we do, by actively engaging with this traditional Ugandan culture in a positive and fresh way, we’re hoping to make that happen. It’s just that our message is delivered through dance instead of words.

Could you talk about how Nihiloxica came about? 

The seeds for Nihiloxica were sown when Spooky-J came to Uganda with Blip Discs in 2016 to do a small residency and performance at Nyege Nyege. He met the Nilotika guys there and had a little recording session but nothing came out of it really. He really enjoyed their energy, though, and organised with Arlen and Derek from Nyege to come back in 2017 to create a live electronic project using the Bugandan drums. He brought me along with him to handle all the electronics, and we thought my techno/metal influenced droney synth style would suit the music, and it turns out it did!

Your members are based between Uganda and the UK – how does your particular international collaboration work?

Logistically it can be a bit of a nightmare sometimes. We always wanted to be a band, not a one off recording project. This was fundamental to our idea of how to work with the music, and to develop a deeper connection between the two spheres of music that we operated from. For this it really meant that we had to spend loads of time rehearsing, and after our debut EP went so well, it was clear that we were staying in Uganda for the foreseeable future. We spent two years living in Kampala and practicing every week, and between Nihiloxica and Biiri you can really hear the difference in our ability to play with one another. This could only come through loads of hours spent rehearsing and jamming.

What’s the split between live in the studio and production manipulation? I imagine there’s a lot of improvisation that takes place, later to be refined? 

We improvise a lot when we’re playing. Our songs come through recording ourselves playing together, experimenting with different ideas from different members of the group or with different ancestral rhythms from Uganda, and listening back through those sessions and refining the results. When we hit the studio, we have a fairly solid idea of what the structure of the song is going to be and what parts we’re going to play, but none of us plays the exact same thing twice. Also, if anyone messes up then the whole take is ruined as we all record at the same time, so it becomes a task of repeatedly smashing out the tunes until we get ‘the perfect take’. There’s been a little bit more post production on the synths with Kaloli, as we really wanted to take the sound to the next level for a full length album, but there is nothing on record that we couldn’t recreate in the live environment, and that’s the way we want to keep it.

How would you describe the Nihiloxica sound and what do you hope listeners take away from it? 

In the band we have a term we like to use to describe our music: traditional techno. The tradition comes from Bugandan drumming and its unique sense of hypnotic repetition with slight variations. Really, when you see Nilotika playing without any electronics at all, that sound is super techno already. All the elements are there in a somewhat mutated form. By bringing our drum kit and synths from ‘the West’ and combining them with the drums, we’re not changing the fundamental feeling that music gives you: this transcendental experience of losing your mind to the rhythm (in a good way of course!). In general, though, we’re trying to steer away from the word techno. It seems a bit too limiting, and our horizons are much broader than just techno!

What does the album mean to you? 

Our debut album was a collection of new and old songs to begin with, but when it came to recording the music and thinking about how we wanted to combine them as a unit, the album really started to come together as a holistic piece of music. I think it’s a wonderful statement of everything we’re about as a band so far. Tunes like “Supuki” and “Busoga” we’ve been playing live since we started, but have struggled to get them to fit on our EPs, which Nyege Nyege were subtly pushing into a darker, more industrial vibe. With the context of the album, they were really given the time they needed to breathe, and while we have softer, more expansive tunes on the album, we also go heavier and harder than we ever have, too, with a tune like “Bwola”, which is basically our answer to a metal breakdown for 5 minutes!

Do you view Nihiloxica as being part of any larger musical movement? 

Of course. We would be nowhere without the huge amount of attention being focussed on Nyege Nyege as a melting pot and a platform for all the brilliant work coming out of East Africa right now. This also comes off the back of audiences looking further afield for their fix of experimental dance music. There’s scenes all across the world at the moment that seem to be usurping the common trend of dance music being dominated by American and Western European producers. ‘World music’ is a term that seems laughably antiquated nowadays, and this can be nothing but positive for music as a whole across the world.

Who do you see as your influences?

My personal influences come heavily from modern extreme metal (see Meshuggah). This guided my interests in electronic music too, so as I met Jacob at uni and we both got more and more into dance music, I was quickly drawn into the more syncopated, dissonant and industrial spheres of techno. The UK ‘sound’ (if it is possible to even say such a thing) has always seemed to glide between all my favourite musical ideas. I think even if I was a long way from the UK, I would still be deeply infatuated with the sounds coming from there. Grime is another thing I love – the stark, forceful nature of the delivery of the beats and the words really resonates with me.

What’s on the horizon for Nihiloxica? 

Hopefully we’ll be touring again before the end of the year. This album was supposed to be backed up with a big festival tour – obviously that isn’t happening, and we’re itching to get on the road and do what we do best. Jacob and I also need to take a big ol’ trip back to Kampala to work on new material. We gotta get that next album on the go! Expect more of everything. Personally, I wanna go super heavy on the next album. We’ve shown the world that we can do softer stuff, now to get back to the heavy hitters.

Nihiloxica Bandcamp

(Photographs by Will Leeming)