Atlanta producer Nikki Nair has spent the past few years establishing himself as one of the most playful figures in American bass music, and More Is Different—his debut for Claude VonStroke’s Dirtybird White Label—finds him at his most unfettered. Four tracks of dubstep, electro and beat-scene hip-hop, the EP arrived as Resident Advisor’s pick of the week, and it’s easy to hear why: this is bass music with a skip in its step.
The title borrows from physicist Philip Anderson’s aphorism about emergence, and it fits. Whatever style Nair reaches for, he bends it out of shape; drums land off the grid, basslines stretch and snap like elastic, and hooks arrive as cartoonish squelches and half-finished vocal chops rather than conventional melodies. Nothing settles for more than a few bars, yet the shifts feel natural—the work of a producer who has internalised these sounds rather than simply borrowed them.
Opener It Goes sets the tone across seven and a half minutes, a dubstep-inflected groove built on a low-slung, wobbling bassline and percussion that skitters just ahead of the beat, accumulating pressure before dissolving into a wonky, half-time conclusion. Socket is the EP’s most direct moment—a lean electro machine-funk workout whose crisp, sequenced arpeggio and chunky drums wouldn’t sound out of place on an Aux88 record. Something slows things into beat-scene hip-hop territory, all dusty textures and head-nodding swing, whilst closer Want To You leans furthest into the weird, pairing a queasy synth lead with a shuffling rhythm and a vocal that sounds like it’s been run through a blender. It’s the sound of a producer enjoying himself immensely.
An EP this restless could easily feel like a pile of sketches, but More Is Different holds together because Nair’s production is so focused—the drums are crisp, the basslines weighty, every oddity carefully placed. For an artist best known for club singles, it’s a confident statement of range, and proof that bass music can be strange without ever sacrificing its groove. Weird and wonderful, indeed.
