NG
Dance of the Avantgardes

NG – the contraction of the previous monicker 'Northgate' – is the musical expression of Evor Ameisie, since 1995 also a singer and percussionist in the collective of Camerata Mediolanense (where he is known as Trevor), a small cult object of the dark and neoclassical scene. The project has been active since 1992 and initially moves along the lines of darkwave, electronics, and ambient. Evor himself describes NG/Northgate as a dynamic project, in which instrumentalists alternate and revolve around the creative center – Evor himself – to give birth to something changeable. The synthesis and at the same time the metamorphosis of NG's artistic experience up to this point is represented by Dance of the Avantgardes, an album released digitally in 2011 and, in 2012, in physical format under Disques de l'Europe Morte, the label founded by Evor himself (the present album is its first publication), indicating that there is a desire to place no restrictions on creative expression. In this work, Evor is joined by Giovanni Libracub on bass, Manguss and Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo on guitars, and Il Bue on drums.

Dance of the Avantgardes is an album difficult to fully describe in terms of musical genre, perhaps impossible; maybe even unnecessary, just know that it is good music. There are dark vibrations, there is ambient, there is electronics, there is psychedelia, and there is something else, an originality that blends everything together and makes NG's offering special and unique.

Listening to these eight tracks, the impression one gets – or at least, the one I had – is of entering a friendly territory shrouded in protective mists, experiencing a sort of muffled comfort. Paperfog is the perfect introduction, with its enveloping initial motif obsessively repeated until the end, the bass ascending and descending and marking relaxed tempos, the synthetic backdrop and stretched guitar notes filled with feedback – almost to the edge of drone in the finale. Over all this, Evor's voice stands out, which in NG – unlike the full and baritone singing in Camerata – is always stretched, warm, enveloping, prominent yet sober. Each piece has its own character, is recognizable, but above all, is pleasing: the seductive atmospheres of Crimson Anger; the space-ambient and spiral form of T-Mask Man; the warmth, the pulsating bass and the final collective, almost celebrative voices of Thermal Lovesong; the hypnotic background noise and liquid, rarefied electronic atmospheres of Come and see Wild; the guitars and above all the drums that in Liquid Lambs rise and become more magmatic; and I’m Only Happy When I Hide (which at times brings to mind Ulver’s Shadows of the Sun), a long and solemn nocturnal dance in the forest, with the face turned towards the sky to peek at the stars through the branches of the trees. Then, just before the end, the album gives us an unexpected change of direction: Channel Me is an electronic piece to the core, which immediately captures with its rhythms, representing a sort of 'carefree finale'. A piece certainly successful, but that seems to deviate a little too much from the path followed up to that point in the album (without a doubt an intentional detail).

In summary, this effort by NG turns out to be very valid, fresh, special, with character; it escapes excessively confining classifications and carves out its own space in the underground scene. What to say: keep an eye on them.

[NG and Dance of the Avantgardes on Bandcamp.]