Nuisance is a collaborative project between Ryan E. Weber (aka REW<<), William J. Seidel (Decibully, Dramatic Lovers), Scott Robert Allen and Eric Osterman (who also records with Weber under the moniker Eric & Magill). We’ve written about the outfit several times over recent months, first with debut album Kuchisabishii and then follow-up EP Qanisquineq, describing the novel approach to songwriting the project offers. Because Nuisance is born from a wider project Seidel and Weber call Poetic Devices, where they build an extensive database of virtual sounds by recording instruments and coding them as software. What we’ve described as the “atomic level building blocks” which they use to create “album-sized ecosystems.”
With this in mind, the previous releases were ambitious enough, but the latest Nuisance project takes those ideas and pushes them to new heights. Coming next month on Katuktu Collective, triple album SAND, STONE, GLASS follows the template set with Kuchisabishii and Qanisquineq but with the dial twisted to eleven. “SAND, STONE, GLASS is an album that was recorded before it was written,” the band explain. “Selected instruments were deeply sampled then coded and designed into a series of 31 virtual instruments by the artist(s) and used exclusively in the making of the record(s).”
Nuisance left no stone unturned when collecting these instruments. They include everything from a refurbished abandoned felted piano and heirloom oud, to a vintage home organ borrowed from Facebook marketplace and synths crafted from experimental found sounds. But the expanded library was only the beginning of the project’s vision. Because just as Scott Robert Allen and Eric Osterman reimagined songs from Kuchisabishii to make the Qanisquineq EP, the triple album invites the collaborators to make two entirely new records from the nineteen songs of the first. The result is essentially three variants of the same album: SAND, STONE, GLASS.
Lead single ‘Sepia’ gives a view into how this plays out. The SAND version of the track is what Nuisance describe as “indie folk meets bedroom pop with a pinch of doo wop,” its acoustic washes drawing the listener into rich world of ambient textures, piano and organ beats. But the STONE variant favours a starker ambient style, the acoustic elements stripped out and replaced with a sense of space, while the GLASS offering leans much further toward the piano, maintaining the expansive atmosphere of its predecessor but offering a fonder, poignant tone.
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SAND, STONE, GLASS will be released on 3rd March via Katuktu Collective. You can listen to all three iterations of ‘Sepia’ and ‘Davenport’ now via the Nuisance Bandcamp page.