NUN

NUN are a Melbourne four-piece of figurehead Jenny Branagan with Steve Harris, Hugh Young and Tom Hardisty. Their self-titled debut LP begins with ‘Immersion II’, an initiation of unreserved, frightening vocals and creeping, cloudy synthesiser. An impressive number of hammering dance songs follow, all slightly nefarious with densely layered electronics. ‘Cronenberg’, which was the B-side of their first release on Nihilistic Orbs, does well to be repeated here. Where the original cut was a faded metallic haze, the reworked track bears up each beating mechanism, sirens oscillating, to resolve in the manner of a strange video-game triumph sequence.

Branagan’s verse is knotty with affixes and statements that bite. The varying level of vocal effects throughout stands up to interrogations once you get a taste of the wet and blistering effects achieved in ‘Kino’ and ‘In Blood’. Flitting from a paranormal MC to an alien herself is all down to exceptional lyrical fluency. Most important, however, is that as a collective NUN invigorate a recent history of dreadful mumbling reluctantly prised from the grasp of bedroom switch-flickers. It’s a genius stroke to combine such disparate players – from Woolen Kits, Vacuum and Constant Mongrel, among others – as technicians in this group. While they’re strictly electronic, the range of wires, pedals, pads and keys they utilise allows them to fill the room just as well as any traditionally instrumented band.

NUN operate from mirrored halls, looking to the future from the past, disorientated and out of place. Firstly in their name, the label of a decrepit and all but extinct sect of women who choose an existence of solitude and chastity, dedicated to a formless yet penetrating Holy Spirit. The nun is a mutant phenotype, and sisters of religion receive a morbid dressing, if a marginalised one, relative to the witch.

Next there is the debt to early electronic music, from the wind-up productions of BBC Radiophonic whizzes called Ray Cathode to its infestation and pinnacle in 1979 with Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle. NUN cover an overwhelming range in their productions, filtering the enduring human inclination for hysterics and paranoia with documents of science fiction. The sound clips stitched between songs tighten these threads of thought wonderfully. They include an old Australian sound bite that references the meaning of ‘weird’ at its source – for unearthly and predestined forces – and a morbid Brit who intones with horror: “If you see a ghost in the mirror, the devil gets you…” Adding these to the death-wish eroticism inspired by Videodrome and referring to the Euro-bender of doctored metal and so inclined minds, ‘Uri Geller’ makes it all clear.

Madness, a trait not yet extinguished by evolution, comes from uncertainty and the unknown. And there is no shortage of that in the mind.

by Freya Zaknich