Hometown: Aichi, Japan.
The lineup: Noah (music, production).
The background: The Japanese artist/soundscaper/dreamweaver Noah makes music that sounds like our favourite “Cloud&B” femmes combined and exaggerated. One track in particular, Face – from her recent, third free-to-download mixtape, Mood – is like some fantasy extrapolation of the new greats of avant-R&B: SZA + Kelela x Jhené Aiko cubed. The press release describes her as “the ghost of Aaliyah”. Think also the spectral mist in which Cassie and Jessy Lanza do their best work: that’s close to the atmosphere created here. Another one? It’s like the vapour that trails behind FKA twigs at her most evanescent.
Her music has that insubstantial, ineffable quality: it is R&B abstracted, rarefied, sublimated, with static, glitches and clicks to offer a sense of future-music with a distant connection to some long-lost past; many of her tracks appear to have sampled the sort of symphonic soul featured in this Guardian Music 10 of the best from 29 April. She’s the missing link between Thom Bell and Burial. Her voice is equally antithetical to the idea of “human-ness”: she doesn’t sing, she exhales, wills wisps, curlicues of breath, and somehow they get captured on tape before they disappear into the ether.
So anyway, Noah is a 27-year-old composer and producer from Tokyo who grew up listening to elegiac piano music, “angelic choir harmony from churches”, soundtracks to French animation films, 90s trip hop and R&B. All of these have impacted, ever so delicately, on her three mixtapes, and on her forthcoming debut album proper, Sivutie, which means “side road” in Finnish. We hesitate to call it ambient because it demands close attention rather than passive sedation. It is more chilling than chilled. There are titles connoting enervation and entropy, such as Flaw, Weak, even Gorgeous Death, and tracks such as Blur which essay an eerie kind of electronica. This is nocturnal, bad-mood anti-muzak featuring all manner of drones, witch-hisses and the looped cries of a child trapped in an attic. Even when it is at its most beautiful, as on Unspoken, it’s the sad, haunted variety of beauty, like the siren song of an R&B artist from the other side – as though Noah is in touch, literally, with the ghost of Aaliyah.
The buzz: “Achingly noir.”
The truth: She goes Back & Forth – between this world and the other side.
Most likely to: Try again.
Least likely to: Need a resolution.
What to buy: Sivutie is released by Flau on 22 June.
File next to: Cuushe, SZA, Kelela, FKA twigs.
Links: noahdromme.com
Ones to watch: Holy Child, Inheaven, The Receiver, Børns, Strange Names.
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