Nihiti’s Dragan O. is serious about bass. You know, the kind of deep and sexy boom that travels up your legs and fiddles with your natural heart beat, bass that may be even too low to detect but that sneaks in the tiny water-logged caverns of your inner ear and knocks your entire body for a loop. When he returned from an extended sojourn into the eternal white night that is the Berlin techno scene, he fitted out his Williamsburg loft apartment with a subwoofer and deluxe speaker system that can be heard up to three blocks away. Dragan assures me that his is hands-down the best sound system in Brooklyn, though truly serious DJs in Berlin often have about fifteen of the same units blaring at once. I think one of his many missions in life is to make us wimpy Brooklyn kids wise up to the majesty of the deep.
On non-party nights, Dragan presides over his 6th floor kingdom from a table set-up at the far corner of the loft, swinging a long lanyard of keys and staring wide-eyed into a laptop that is plugged directly into a mixer. The treble component of his sound system, trilling at half-mast, rises up ominously like two small mountains on either side. As friends and neighbors come and go in the common space, chatting and giggling and transporting plates of uncooked meat up to grill on the roof, the air of concentration surrounding this makeshift dashboard is thick enough to cut with a knife.
The endless stream of Dragan-curated MP3s that you can count on flowing forth from this station at any given hour on any every given day is totally all over the place, sometimes spanning John Fahey and Kosmiche and Nine Inch Nails in the space of a few minutes. Dance music is just one of Dragan’s recurring passions, and “Black Cars (A Sinistra),” one of my favorite tracks that he recently sent my way, shows that he’s heard enough of it to master one of it’s most powerful secrets — namely, that less of something very loud and meaty is inevitably always more, and that a missed beat, a subtracted sound, always matters a whole lot more than one you can actually hear. Regardless of what Dragan says, I don’t think you have to be from Berlin to appreciate that.
Nihiti, “Black Cars (A Sinistra)” (Other Peoples Memories, Lo Bit Landscapes)
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Nihiti’s album Other People’s Memories drops October 5 on Lo Bit Landscapes Follow Nihiti on Twitter for Dragan-generated prophecies, and check out his SoundCloud for additional tunes.
Words: Emilie Friedlander
