NOMON "Echoes of Breakage"
Echoes of Breakage is the debut album from New York’s NOMON, the sister duo of percussionists Shayna and Nava Dunkelman. Building on the deft collision of traditional Asian sounds, electronics, and contemporary percussion music established on the duo’s 2021 EP Card II, the new album captures dramatic artistic growth and sonic expansion. The duo’s deep roots in percussion music have been increasingly complimented by the seamless incorporation of electronics and long-form compositional ideas. They’ve arrived at a bracing marriage of past, present, and future, making sense of disparate individual musical practices. Echoes of Breakage boldly elides any sort of stylistic convention, instead tapping into instinct and careful listening to bring seemingly incongruous ideas together, whether it’s how gamelan-inspired breakdowns are subsumed by moody electronic soundscapes or the way they build slow-build dramatic tension through meticulously measured interaction where every gesture is carefully weighted.
Echoes of Breakage is a celebration of family that uses a wide assortment of tools, styles, and rhythms unbound by any single tradition, era, or aesthetic. In NOMON Shayna and Nava Dunkelman push one another and coalesce, trusting their guts to meld their ideas into richly unified pieces that don’t concern themselves with genre. Instead it delivers a perfect marriage of pleasure, rigor, and experimentation, rejecting any notion that such things are mutually exclusive.