Nika Son: ASLOPE
Navel-Gazers #80 is an interview with Nika Son who is going to talk to us about ASLOPE. Every few months I set aside some time to research music released in the past couple of years. The amount of material floating out there can get overwhelming, but I always manage to uncover some gems thanks to my keen spider-sense! While I wouldn’t say that the album title is the only thing which drew me to ‘ASLOPE’, it certainly leapt out. What is “aslope” anyway: is that a name, a neologism, malapropism, just an obscure word? The music itself - which I’ve since played back repeatedly - seems to occupy a permanent corner in my mind now, with that singular title dangling overhead. Described as an “ode to the nocturnal world”, ‘ASLOPE’ drifts through the ears like nightly consciousness itself, broken from time to time by distinct snippets of waking life that seem to emerge and recede from a crepuscular haze. And perhaps we the listeners are in transit, being ushered around the haze by some rogue GPS, with its own sense of direction… This is one of those albums, not just a collection of sounds or songs or “tracks” but something totally immersive and unforgettable. I highly recommend this one to our readers. And it’s our privilege to hear from the artist, Nika Son who is beaming her responses in from Hamburg, Germany… ahoy!
AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! Please first could you tell us who you are - what is your background as an artist?
i mainly work as a musician, (sound) artist and film composer, but then there are other things like curation and djing here and there. i originally come more from the visual side, studying fine arts in hamburg, where i always moved between different disciplines, mainly drawing, collage and video at first, but sound more and more became my central medium.
music has always been an important part of my life and my interest in more obscure sounds started already in my teens. i remember very clearly the time when i moved to the uk for two years when i was 16 and did my A-levels in Bath and Bristol (my mum is british). i was very shy and also quite lonely during that time. radio was my anchor. the Peel sessions had the biggest impact, where i discovered so many things outside the mainstream and genres that i had never heard before.
my approach to music and sound is unacademic and very much learning by doing (i did play piano for three years when i was around ten but gave up very quickly during puberty). it mostly came through discovering music and always being curious about what things around me can sound like.
during my studies i had strong ties to the film department through friendships with filmmakers, many of whom i still work with today. especially the filmmaker and artist helena wittmann, with whom i shared a studio for many years. we kind of grew up together in our fields, inspiring each other and learning from each other a lot. through this, film became a huge inspiration for my music. not so much soundtracks themselves, but the relationship between sound and image. working as both a composer and sound designer made me very aware of how strongly they shape each other. this can also be a film with no music at all.
also working for many years at a club called Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg, which had another huge impact on my musical path. from weird concerts on a Tuesday night to wayward club music on a Sunday. and for sure all the artists that i met, invited, or listened to throughout those years are part of my background and shaped what i'm doing now.
Nika Son: this album has no clear starting point. it's actually a collection of pieces from a certain period (i think from 2021–2024) that were either composed as standalone tracks or are excerpts from some of my sound installations and video works. i later realised that they all had a common thread, which is the night in some way or another.
during that time i deeply explored the topics around insomnia - something i have experienced since childhood - and the different intermediate states between sleep and wakefulness. i had always kept this topic out of my work because i already had to deal so much with sleeplessness and everything that comes with it in my life. i didn't want to give it even more space but of course it had already influenced my music and everything else i was doing in such a fundamental way that, at some point, i felt i should actually start working 'with' it. on top of that i'm a night owl. always have been.
Scattered sprinkle, no turn and Echo of Insomnia in particular stem from these explorations of how perception shifts at night, especially in a present shaped by constant and excessive stimuli.
also La nuit tombe, which is an excerpt of a collaborative video-sound-performance (also called Cae la noche or Es fällt die Nacht) with Helena Wittmann, where we filmed and recorded only at night.
AC: The long track Scattered sprinkle, no turn is my favourite here. Tell us all about how you composed this, and about the mysterious mechanical sounds and voices we hear along the way.
Nika Son: this piece has a longer story. in 2023 i had a residency at q-o2 in brussels where i started composing a multi-channel work around the topics i mentioned before. it later became an installation called Scatter, no turn. on ASLOPE you hear an excerpt of this larger composition. the live version is around 30 minutes long and includes video and objects.
you can actually hear a live recording of the performance at oscillation festival 2024 on umland editions.
the residency gave me the space to focus on questions of how perception changes at the threshold between different states at night, and how unstable these thresholds actually are. i tried to explore (and not only experience) what happens in those in-between conditions... between sleep and wakefulness, between the desire to fall asleep and the resistance to it. sound, time and memory all become less fixed, blurry, fragile, but also strangely ambiguous. at night our senses become more sensitive, especially hearing.
the mechanical sounds partly come from objects, devices and machines that i recorded in Brussels during that time, while others derive from my ever-expanding archive of sounds that i have collected over the years. i treat this archive as a kind of instrument that i can process, manipulate and strip from its original context. for me it's not necessarily important to know the origin of a sound, but rather what happens when it is displaced.
the voices also have different origins. some are my own, some come from all sorts of video scraps i find in the www and others were generated by feeding specific texts into voice generators. scattered thoughts and words, remembered, hovering or captured.
later that same year the work developed further into an exhibition at GAK Bremen, where it became a multimedia installation in which image and sound were deliberately not synchronised, but constantly shifting in relation to one another.
AC: ‘Scattered sprinkle…’ isn’t the only time where we can hear voices on ‘ASLOPE’ - to my ears, the human voice is audible on 8 of these 11 tracks. Whose voices are they? What are they saying? Does it matter?
Nika Son: yes voices. they are very important to me although i only use them sparingly, scattered again.
i often work with texts that i write while composing the piece - very intuitive word collages, more like poems. then i either record them with my voice or feed them into a voice generator on my computer. i've worked with computer-generated voices in my music for many years now. they have become shockingly human-sounding. sometimes i also let different accents speak texts that have been translated back and forth several times into different languages. this creates a strange fantasy language of its own, which becomes another “instrumental” element in the piece.
i treat the voices just like every other sound in my music...as you can hear they are often manipulated, repitched, reversed, cut-up, morphed. they shift between recognizability and abstraction, which i like.
i can tell you now that my voice actually appears in track 1, track 6 and track 8. in Echo of Insomnia there are also several real human voices from small interviews i recorded with friends speaking about their perception of night.
especially in ASLOPE the voices often function as traces, interruptions, memories or residues of language rather than meaningful lyrics.
AC: The sound of footsteps is also prominently featured at least three times: on ‘Bats eating flags’, ‘La nuit tombe’, and Gelbes Feld. Is there something which particularly interests you about this sound? And, where did you derive the recordings of it?
Also, isn’t it strange that the footsteps sound to me as though they were recorded at night, despite there sonically not being any real evidence that they were?
Nika Son: hah i really like this question. it's the first time that someone asks explicitly about footsteps in my music.
i guess in a way i'm a bit obsessed with them.
footsteps are extremely ordinary sounds that you hear every day, if you don’t lie in bed all the time. but if you listen to them closely, you can hear how musical they actually are. there are so many variations of footsteps in this world - depending on the shoe, or barefoot, the ground you're walking on, the weight, the rhythm, the space, etc.
but i also hate them sometimes. in my work as a sound designer for film i'm often confronted with them of course. and if the original footsteps are missing, you have to build them. it can be a pain in the ass to synchronize footsteps in films. i'm mainly working in experimental film where the budget is often not high enough to pay a foley artist who is actually specialized in creating footsteps.
at the same time, if you listen to footsteps in films, you realize how important they are and how they can create iconic moments.
also in track 9, La nuit tombe, i used concrete footsteps that slowly become a drum rhythm.
your perception of the “night steps” is interesting. some of them are definitely walked at night. best time to record them anyway.
AC: How do you decide on things such as the track sequence, titles, and the title “ASLOPE”? Are these decisions important from your point of view?
Nika Son: titles can be a torture.
not only for tracks, also for artworks, exhibitions, books...
but sometimes they just appear out of nowhere.
i have a notebook where i collect words or sentences that could become titles. they are often also ripped out of context, just like i use texts in my works. sometimes it’s a scrap of a conversation, or a line from a dialogue, or something i read. i’m also a big fan of the thesaurus. probably the best pool for titles actually.
i also like titles that have a certain weirdness or humour.
on ASLOPE some of them derive from the works they are excerpted from, like Echo of Insomnia, which was originally a multi-channel sound installation. or Scattered sprinkle, no turn and La nuit tombe.
the album title ASLOPE just popped up one day. i was looking for synonyms of the word “crooked”. aslope was one of them. i think i had never used it before. i liked it a lot, and it also fits the state of sleeplessness. feeling aslope.
AC: What about the cover image, by Oliver Pitt? It really caught my attention personally as being unusual - how did you coordinate on this?
i think i initially got to know his graphic work through the extraordinary covers of the equally extraordinary band Golden Teacher, where he was also part of. then also through posters for the radio art festival Radiophrenia. i’ve followed his work since then. a few years ago i got to know him briefly when we shared a stage at The Old Hairdressers, a concert venue in Glasgow.
at some point while finishing the album it was clear that i wanted to ask Ollie to do the cover, and i was very happy he agreed.
after a few back and forths with different ideas we decided on this one. he told me later that it was almost entirely made from found objects he picked up off the street... this made it even more special to me. another scattered sprinkle...
also special about the cover is that one layer has been screenprinted afterwards. it became a bit of an action: we screenprinted it here in Hamburg after the covers arrived, in a self-organised screenprinting space at Rote Flora. actually Tobi (Duffner), one half of the label V I S where Aslope was released, did the actual work.
now i also want to mention Oliver's brother Laurie Pitt, a great musician and a lovely human as well. check them out!
AC: You’re based in Hamburg, what do you get up to down there? Is it a pleasant home for nocturnal musique concrète?
Do you have any current or upcoming projects you’d like to mention, or additional thoughts for our readers while you’re here?
Nika Son: i would say yes, Hamburg is very nocturnal friendly.
as i'm a night owl i experience the city a lot at night. my studio is on the other side of the river Elbe, so for years i've been commuting (mostly by bike) from St. pauli to Veddel, passing through Hamburg’s industrial areas, over bridges or sometimes through the old tunnel. actually, on these trips many of my recordings were made and later ended up in my works. sounds that i only ever heard at night. again, it is the senses that are heightened in the dark.
i especially love the faraway sounds of the big industrial harbour area that is not accessible as a private person. from the other side it always seems like a detached, enigmatic world where you hear sounds the whole night as if it never sleeps.
there is so much to tell about how the night changes a city.
i definitely had some of the most intense and sometimes almost mystical experiences at night. moments where sound, space and movement feel strangely detached from daytime logic.
i always tend to have too many projects at the same time. after a very harsh and stressful year in 2025, i had to step back quite a bit and went through a bit of a blank period.
but now its busy again. at the moment i'm working on two film projects where i do the composition, and some concerts here and there. but in the summer i want to finally finish my next album. i'm slow.
there will also be some smaller releases this year that have been in the pipeline for a while.
and i want to continue some recent collaborations, for example with the drummer Will Guthrie or the cellist Magdalena Ceple. with Will i had a first concert in Athens this year. we didn’t know each other before but it worked really well. we will meet again in September in Brussels and plan to record material for an album. so let’s see…
thank you very much for your unusual and interesting questions!
