Nigel Wright - Flotter

There are so many tiny cd-r labels, and so many releases, it's basically impossible to keep up. We do what we can, sort of pick and choose the best we can find, and one of our favorites is NZ guitarist Nigel Wright. Unlike the legions of overproducers out there, we've only managed three Wright releases in 3 years. This one makes it four, and it's absolutely gorgeous. Gauzy and hazy, woozy and washed out, dense and dreamlike. Fennesz, Jeck, Tim Hecker, Wright travels a similar sonic path, creating gorgeous sun dappled soundscapes of softly blurred melodies, of buried notes, his guitar not so much expelling notes and chords, as much as unfurling lush sonic tapestries, soft focus, bleary eyed beauty, peppered with clouds of crumbling distortion, shards of delay, streaks of muted whir, but all deftly incorporated into Wright's constantly shifting soundworld.
Somehow the world at large needs to discover what Wright is capable of. C'mon Touch, swoop in and snatch this man up and give him some resources to make the record we know he's capable of. If he can make records this pretty with a guitar and a 4-track, the mind boggles... 
Aquarius Records (www.aquariusrecords.org) USA

Since about five years works Nigel Wright inside experimental music, as member of Nest and solo, having releases on CMR and some that were self-released. Here he releases 'Flotter', which is created from field recordings, guitar and tape loops, which all feed into the laptop and which are used to create a thick smear of sound. I say smear, but I mean this positively though. Wright staples sound on sound on sound (etc), thus blurring the fine lines between field recording, guitar and tape-loop, and something else arrives: a finely woven pattern of sounds, that only reveal their beauty by either looking very close by or from some distance. The first piece, 'Wildts' has some angular loud sound, but the following three are soft, meditative but also dark, moody atmospheric. As such Wright doesn't do much new work, not in the sense of his background as a New Zealand composer (although this is far from the usual lo-fi), or in a wider sense of dark ambient music made with field recordings, but I think he does a pretty fine job in creating some autumn infected tunes of low fog music. Quite nice.
fdw - Vital Weekly

Nigel Wright / Tim Coster
This little three inch by New Zealand natives Tim Coster & Nigel Wright really packs a slow-burning wallop over its seventeen-minute duration. Beginning with some rather ephemeral rhythmic loops the and subtle glitches, the duo build and build on their sound in waves, allowing things to peak and dissipate before coming back around again with another with another swell in sound. With a number of musicians working with drones these days Coster and Wright have really established something significant within this track, as their music, never at any moment falls into the background, but constantly engulfs the listener in swathes of sounds so deep that one sometimes wonders whether they’ll be able to come up from this. Luckily and at the sometime almost disappointingly a calm comes over the end of the track, slowly dissipating into silence. It would be interesting to see a full length that carried this much weight. 8/10 -- Cory Card (14 August, 2007) - foxy digitalis

Nest/Tim Coster
The Nest/Tim Coster recording was made at the Wine Cellar (like the previous Nest & MHFS (see Vital Weekly 560) and is quite a hissy affair of mainly guitar like sounds, but with the presence of two computer, no doubt the sound has been picked up and modified, altered and processed inside the world of ones and zeroes. Slowly moving around, high in the field of lo-fi drones, this is a most enjoyable release of experimental drone music, still like they do best in New Zealand. - fdw - Vital 575

New Zealand's Nigel Wright is part of a loose conglomerate of artists, circling around the CMR label, who have found new ways to approach computer music. Wright works with big, weighty chunks of sound and his palette is all oppresive greyscale and flickering hints of kaleidoscopic colour. He uses laptop to weather and and rust his guitars strings, ricocheting hefty down-strummed chords through cavernous banks of effects and then watching the overtones drift in the distance, like trailing headlights captured on polaroids. Sometimes Wright's music suggests the early releases on German techno label Chain Reaction if they were stripped of all rhythm; on the evidence of Tapir, however, I wouldn't be surprised if soon he was spoken of in the same breath as Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz.
The Wire (UK) - October 2006

 Nigel Wright's 'Tapir' is a two-track, 3" CD designed to be played loud. All Talk sees the Auckland-based sound artist feed wild rivers of guitar drone and hand-cranked tape through his laptop, injecting the churning noise with mountains of reverb, thus ensuing boom like that of massive bells at the bottom of a waterfall. Cardboard is all-static, rattlesnake hiss, again, constructed via the processing of raw guitar and tape sounds on the laptop, but this time the more throaty spit of the guitar is juxtaposed by slowly disintegrating melodic waves. Like its predecessor, the dense thrum surrounding the piece is held up by Wright's penchant for melting beauty into sheer volume.  
DB Magazine, Adelaide 2006

We were first introduced to Mr. Nigel Wright (not to be confused with fellow dronester Peter Wright) via a super limited cd-r on the CMR label. A gorgeous assemblage of mysterious loop based systems. Totally hit the spot for fans of Coleclough, Ambarchi, Nilsen, Chalk and the like (like us!). Well, recently Wright got in touch with us to see if we wanted to carry his latest release, another super limited cd-r, this time a 15 minute 3" in crafty hand made packaging. Well, the answer was obviously "Hell yeah!" and thus we have this, another completely mesmerizing slab of warm fuzzy looped and drone drenched goodness. The first track comes on like some My Bloody Valentine William Basinski mash up. Thick gauzy waves of distortion wrapped around delicate glistening melodies, layered and looped into a haunting ebb and flow of pulsing drone and slow shifting buzz. The sound is very organic, rich and thick and multi-hued, almost like a warmer fuzzier SUNNO))). The second track pushes even further out in the same fuzzed out blown out ambient direction, the guitars (?) are even more corrosive, channeling the wall of skree sound of bands like Sunroof! but filtered through the doe-eyed innocence and romantic moodiness of bands like M83 or any of their like minded Gooom labelmates. Dreamy and ambient enough to be perfect for the drone obsessed, but enough like some avant rockdrone outfit to appeal to folks who have been digging Nadja, The Angelic Process, Hjarnidaudi, Jesu and the like. Awesome! Not sure how limited these are but we're guessing VERY, so act fast. Packaged in tiny little plastic sleeves with colored paper covers and simple typed insert. 
Aquarius Records - USA - 2006

Fuck, first there was Celebrate Psi Phenemona, and then Pseudoarcana jumped into the fray, and now CMR is the latest label to start releasing super limited edition cd-r's from the New Zealand underground of improv free-noise, lo-fi drone scraping, and damaged sound art. Not to be confused with the Andrew Lloyd Webber associate of the same name, the Auckland based Nigel Wright focuses on loop-based systems which he transforms into miasmic drones. It's hard to say if those looping systems refer to feedbacking loops (which is possible as there is a cyclical sine-wave feel to many of Wright's sounds) or to a Terry Riley time-lag accumulation (which is also possible with all of the crystaline percolations that ripple through the dronescaping); regardless of the process, Wright's eponymous debut recording alternates between deadened electrical atmospherics and beautifully blissed out driftscapes. Fans of BJ Nilsen, Oren Ambarchi, and Jonathan Coleclough should take note! 
Aquarius Records - USA