LOWEND

The Bronx, New York · b. 2004 · FARA Records

LOWEND (Nasir Devon Pryce, b. 23 March 2004) is from the Bronx, and broadcasts from an undisclosed room — he'd like that kept vague, which is at least half a bit. Born in 2004, he is the first artist on the roster who has never known a world without the feed: no pre-algorithmic adolescence to be nostalgic about. Everything he has ever heard arrived through a recommendation engine, and he worked out early that this was a strange way to receive a culture. He says that is exactly why he's qualified to describe it.

What saved him was pirate radio — New York's long, real, unglamorous tradition of unlicensed broadcasting: stations run out of apartments, transmitters on rooftops, whole communities served by signals that were never supposed to exist. He grew up with a cheap receiver hunting frequencies at night, and found something the feed never gave him: music nobody had chosen for him. He is not nostalgic for analogue; he is hungry for the unsorted. He felt a bass frequency through a wall before he knew what it was — in his chest before his ears — and says the order those two things happened in is the whole point of everything he's made since.

His records are spoken, minimal and deliberately hard to find: one looping bass mantra, a distorted Minimoog with glitch modulation, lo-fi interference under everything, drums hitting hard with real space between them, and call-and-response that arrives late and half-degraded. The defining instrument is silence — he refuses to release anything without it, and calls the gaps between the hits the part they can't compress. A broadcaster rather than a bandleader: low light, minimal movement, a microphone held close, long stretches of quiet he won't fill. The least theatrical performer imaginable, and riveting for it. Watchful, urgent, deadpan.