Chimera incognita

Michigan’s NOMO steer their Afrobeat
into uncharted territories

NOW HEAR NOWHERE: Elliot Bergman (L) and NOMO

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There are plenty of bands out there today for whom the fiery, funky Afrobeat sound of 1970s Nigeria is a destination, a standard to achieve. For Ann Arbor, Michigan collective NOMO, however, it’s the starting point for a musical expedition further and further into uncharted territory.

“Successively, with every record,” says sax player/band leader Elliot Bergman, “we’ve tried to put a little bit more of our own spin on things and delve a little deeper into the sounds that seem to fit naturally. I wouldn’t say we’re consciously distancing ourselves from it—we all love Afrobeat very much—but as we grow together as players and musicians, each of the records gets a little more honest, a little more representative of what we’re all doing musically and checking out.”

NOMO’s latest album, Ghost Rock, integrates the serpentine polyrhythms and bulldozer brass of Afrobeat with free jazz freak-outs, the urgent aggression of punk and, even more than its predecessor New Tones, Bergman’s otherworldly electro-acoustics. On many tracks on Ghost Rock, they were the platform, the egg before the chicken. “New Tones was still pretty much the full band playing live, with a bit of overdubs, a live band with a bit of studio magic after the fact. Ghost Rock was almost the reverse process, starting off with these very strange, looping, rhythmic things and then trying to compose around them. It was like the studio magic happened first.

“A lot of the stuff on the record comes from many hours of experimentation and tweaking weird synthesizers and plugging things into things they shouldn’t be plugged into. And a lot of the instruments used on the album are homemade and shoddily built, so they don’t really sound like something you’d pick up at Guitar Centre.”

Such conjuring of noises that seem drawn from an unidentifiable somewhere, or maybe nowhere, is a defining characteristic of NOMO. “The whole music climate right now, Afrobeat or funk revival aside, sampling culture has permeated all of it. Even if it’s not lifting samples from your favourite soul record, maybe you’ll have a guy recreate the James Jamerson bass sound or have a Bernard Purdie fill on it. I don’t think we’re immune to that, but I’d much rather create something that sounds like it’s coming from our own voice, rather than someone else’s.”

Found sounds that confound

“Voice” is an odd word for Bergman to use. As an instrumental act, NOMO can’t replicate the soapboxing of Afrobeat’s charismatic inventor, Fela Kuti, and aren’t sure they’d want to—“I’m hoping we can find ways to express our views and intents without having to make every song a preachy diatribe,” says Bergman, “so hopefully we’ll be able to get on some Obama rallies and contribute to the political discussion that way.”

Even before they rock for Barack, NOMO make a political point with their “arsenal,” as Bergman calls it, of instruments cobbled together from scraps and leftovers. Junkyard percussion, jerry-rigged second-hand synths and instruments of Bergman’s own devising—the saw-blade gamelan, for instance, or the electric thumb piano—are key to NOMO’s unprecedented sonic palette.

“There is a little bit of a finders’ and recyclers’ aesthetic to a lot of the instruments that are built on the record, and some of them aren’t built. On the first track, ‘Brainwave,’ that’s actually this little brainwave monitor I found at a thrift store. It’s this weird little device—it must be some quack medical device, it couldn’t possibly be legitimate—but there’s an input and an output, you put this diode up on your head and it outputs this horrendous shrieking sound. It’s supposed to indicate something about your mental state, I guess.”

Confusion is the metal state Bergman finds himself in when trying to pinpoint NOMO’s target market. With his roots in punk and indie rock, a line-up drawn from the University of Michigan’s jazz program and an early leaning to world-music festivals for gigs, it’s not immediately obvious who NOMO are supposed to be playing to.

“Maybe the most obvious way to put it is, we can play with Earth Wind & Fire, and that somehow makes sense, and then we can play with Konono No.1, and that makes sense too, and then we play with Dan Deacon and the noise kids are equally into it. And then we’ll get this bunch of 60-year-olds who heard us on NPR and dance to us at their swing-dancing classes.

“Sometimes it’s easier to talk about the things that we’re not, but then, that doesn’t feel too affirming. We want to have it all ways, be all-inclusive and not turn anyone away.”

With Sonido Nordico at
Petit Campus on Wednesday,
July 9, 9 p.m., $12