TD 1
“I’m sampling growling. Somebody sent me a video
of them growling.” Bob Ross smacks his paintbrush against a canvas. “Beat the devil out of it,” he says, repeatedly. A video compilation of Shelley Duvall saying, “Hi, I’m Shelley Duvall,” is warped by a delay effect. The electronic producer known as Fomorian Vein strikes a banded jigger against a kettle. A distorted bass drum hammers away, turning this collage into a demented melody. “Somebody just send me some more fucking samples,” says a voice. It is an improvised mixtape streamed live on Instagram by the artist NITEFISH. For almost three hours, he focuses the camera on a software programme manipulating an eclectic trove of soundbites. Every now and then, he shows himself beaming from underneath a pair of black Speedo goggles. The experiment, he repeats nightly during the first few weeks of Ireland’s lockdown. The end results are a standalone single called Motorolla Ice on Fast Fashion, an ominous gabber-infused industrial dance EP about the tumult sparked by the pandemic. “I was gonna release a whole different EP and do shows, but this happened and I felt I couldn’t release that anymore. I was demotivated. So okay, fuck it, I’m just gonna try to make something that reflects this process that’s happening.” This spontaneous reaction to the sudden cancellation of all future plans is indicative of his general approach to performing. “My philosophy is just to put on my own shows,” he says, when we first meet in an empty cafe six days prior to the lockdown. “It’s just about doing things yourself.” Ingmar, a.k.a NITEFISH, started out in Sweden playing in indie bands, but he always preferred “abrasive music”, left-of-centre artists like Machine Girl, Suicide and Pere Ubu. “I was also VJing, doing projections for dodgy nightclubs, and wanted to make music based entirely on samples and projections.” Drawing on non-musical influences such as the sci-fi author William Gibson, the Extinction Rebellion movement and cli-fi literary theorists, he crafted the NITEFISH concept and began to perform at forest raves in Stockholm. In 2019, he relocated to Dublin to study theatre. That August, he released his debut single, Ibiza, a gruesome lampooning of club culture. “I made it based on a sample from this cringey Ibiza vacation commercial.” The advert, he “mangled” into a pixelated abstraction and then he combined this with footage of polluted beaches. As he details his process, the squeal of a barista steaming milk fills the room and a set of speakers play a post-punk revival band’s hit single. The timing is perfect, in that my reason for reaching out to Ingmar stemmed from the very idea of the genre’s return. “There is this confusion about what punk is supposed to be,” he says. “The whole idea was to break down the process of making music and democratise it. Punk is an idea more than a genre.” Without criticising the artistic merit of groups championed as the saviours of a once-rebellious genre – now accepted and coopted – the fact is that the notion of a revival is only plausible if it were true that punk was simply a sound. In reality, it is a DIY spirit, which shelved the guitar decades ago, and I was gonna release a whole different EP and do shows, but this happened and I felt I couldn’t release that anymore. NITEFISH 18