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Background
Love Remains builds on the approach taken with The Gamins. The album’s bones are beats and basslines, but something different is going on. Nimrawd’s beats are less hip-hop based, and sometimes more in line with an 80s drum machine—although they’re still heavily treated and intense. There’s also a bit of a dark tone. “I was going through a bit of a rough patch in my life. And while I’m a pretty optimistic person, there’s a certain pissed-off-ness and nihilism that found its way into those tunes.
“The writing process is the sample of joyful kids, and in their place, there are coarsely-cut stock vocal samples and metallic old-school dance music synths. “I had this idea of taking these cheesy happy stock vocals and cutting them up and either treating them heavily or doing absolutely nothing to them at all. Then I took the nauseatingly clean EDM synths and added them to dirty beats. It makes no sense, really, but I think it sounds cool.” There’s also a strong variety in the musical approaches for each song. Some pieces, like “Dee dee” harken back to big beat bands like Prodigy. Other songs, like “Quicksilver”, have a cleaner, more straightforward sound, while “Ends in blue” features treated vocals (embarrassingly sung by Nimrawdhimself) and an orchestral interlude. The process of writing Love Remainstook many twists and turns, and the track listing shows that. “I dig a lot of different music,” explains Nimrawd. “I love beat tapes, and I also love IDM. And if I love this stuff, why not try and write it? Plus, I have a general paranoia about writing the same thing over and over again. If I write a song and I find it sounds like another I’ve already released, I panic and either drop it or try and mess it up so it becomes something entirely different.” Unlike The Gamins, Nimrawd’s new LP also includes many short ditties. These, he says, are sometimes songs that just felt right being ditties, but also longer songs which were dropped, and then reborn thanks to a sharp cutting knife and a sense of experimentation.
Short bio
Nimrawd is an electronic musician based in Montreal, Canada. He writes lo-fi instrumental music using live bass, old-school hip-hop beats and field sounds. His initial inspirations when he went solo were low-electronic musicians and good old-fashioned hip-hop crate diggers.
