Community in Collapse

The transcendent takes the front seat on Copenhagen-based Nausia’s latest album, Finding a Circle. Slow builds and intense demolitions form the band’s basic structure, and a web of saxophone harmonies floats through a tight and daring interplay. Not every band manages to preserve the intense feeling of a live concert on a recording. But on Finding a Circle, Nausia succeeds in hammering the gap between stage and studio down to an irrelevant trifle, through a phenomenal and remarkably great-sounding ensemble performance.

There is something about the physical conditions of the saxophone that makes it easy to sense the musician’s presence. The clatter of the keys and the intense breathing make it effortless to form an inner image of the human behind the brass. On the track »E.D Interlude«, the saxophones’ airy exhalations and mechanical flapping ensure that, as a listener, I behave with the same quiet reverence as I would at a concert. So when the next track, »Eco Death«, kicks the door in on the silence, it is hard not to feel almost physically exhilarated by the album’s intense contrasts between presence and destruction.

Titles such as »flowers grow through concrete too« and »Eco Death« cast the wordless album in a bleak light of climate collapse. Finding a sense of community in a chaotic world – whether at a concert, on an album, or elsewhere – is essential to life in a time of crisis. Finding a Circle is a fine example of exactly that.