Nikakoi: Selected auf 2 CDs

Selected draws upon Nikakoi's first two albums, but it's not a complete reissue. Instead, Machaidze has gathered nine tracks from Sestrichka, 11 from Sentimental and 10 all-new recordings. All 30 tracks have been completely resequenced, shuffling old with new to create a hybrid album that's far more than the sum of its parts. Over two and a quarter hours long, Selected is a treasure trove, amazingly rich and varied, of almost cinematic proportions. Appropriately for an artist who also directs and edits film and video, on Selected the forces of chance and sentiment play out in a widescreen panorama of chaos-skirting rhythms and heartstring-tugging melodies. There are ample traces of '90s electronica and IDM in Nikakoi's skittering rhythms and melancholic refrains, but it's not mere redux. Nikakoi is truly a softy at heart, but his music is as complex as any human emotion: both sentimental and sedimentary, Selected is like an architectural survey for a planet where the soil itself is composed of microscopicfragments of memory.