Hello, welcome to the NAW site.
news
06-22-2008Im am happy to announce a number of up coming live naw shows occurring the end of June and through out the month of July, these shows will include Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa and New York. There will be on going up dates about these shows and locations in the live section of this site, over the next coming weeks. In the mean time I will play a hometown show in Toronto on June 24th at The Central hosted by The Ambient Ping. As for other news as I have been promising people, there will be a number of new naw releases this year, after some time I have found a number of homes for this new material so look out for full length and ep length releases to be out over the next 7 months on the following labels, starting in late July with a release on my own Vague Terrain imprint and following up with releases on IO Records (usa), Open Concept (tor, CA), Silent Season (vic, CA), Ping Things (tor, CA) and a few others with compilation and remix material I can talk about as they come out. The naw website will also be undergoing an overhaul and launch as a whole new version and look come the fall, in the mean time if this site goes down for any length of time as a result, you can keep up to date and hear new and old studio material from me on the naw virb page
03-02-2008
Another one of my irregular updates for the naw website. There has been some new naw material released recently on compilations. The first comes in the forum of a remix of Italian idm artists mickey eats plastic and can be found on their website, the release is part of their recently released reworks ep called, kill the white glamour. If you have not as of yet had a chance to check out this idm duo from Italy I highly recommend downloading this ep as well as any of their other self released material. Another recently released compilation I have material on comes once again from the Quebec City netlabel pertin_nce, this follow up to my release on their changes compilation late last year comes in the form 2 new tracks that reference each other called: collecting dust and dust that collects. This compilation like the changes one can be downloaded from the pertin_nce website. In other news I have been booked for a number of live dates this month, you can find more information these shows in the live section of this site. I am still slowly making plans for shows in europe and possibly japan for 2008 so stay tuned for more updates about these pending tours and more new releases by naw in the coming months.
bio
Montreal ex-pat naw (Neil Wiernik) who currently calls Toronto his home, began composing electronic music in 1988 with explorations in audio art and experimental music. Neil's interest in sound and technology has lead him to a continued questioning and refinement of audio tools and modes of production resulting in experimentation with altered instruments, modified devices, and custom software environments. Neil's music could be described as warm, atmospheric, and cinematic electronic music. The sound design of naw is firmly grounded in the rich traditions of dub studio culture but can also be weighed alongside formal contemporary composition. His music was recently described in "The Wire" as having "...the kind of sharpness and clarity usually lost amid the murk and decay of clicks and cuts and digital delays." Neil has released music on various labels including Noise Factory and Sentient Sound.
In addition to his recording career Neil is an accomplished curator and digital media specialist, he has shown work in a variety of non-traditional spaces since the late 1980's and his projects have included works in radio, print, and internet diffusion as well as other non-gallery spaces including derelict buildings, billboards, pirate airwaves, and public space. Neil has presented projects at the Finland Contemporary Museum, ISEA, Subtle Technologies Conference, La SAT, The Medusa Complex, Mutek Festival and The Music Gallery. Neil also co-curates vagueterrain.net - an online digital arts quarterly.
discography
full length
city saturate - noise factory records
terrain vague - rivers of recordings
green nights orange days - noise factory records
the resound of a foggy autumn dawn - noise factory records
gibberish - piehead records (out of print)
re/sound/live - a/s systems (out of print)
single / EP
cracked lines & broken signals EP - sentient sound
binary route EP - noise factory
anagram - clevermusic
sil/ent/mu/te - orange records/tone
low level breathing - mutant cactus recordings
compilation / remix
dust that collects - trial - pertin_nce
collecting dust - trial - pertin_nce
every april [naw's amphibious mating season mix] - to kill the white glamour/reworks ep - mickey eats recordings
low air pressure - changes - pertin_nce
consumed user - andrew duke, consumer vs. user remixed - stratagem musik
sustained - no. 3 - noise factory records
penny fishing north on bay - no. 3 - noise factory records
cloning (1 Blood Made 2) - aidan baker, remixes - noise factory/arcolepsy
our reflection echoes on (camembert, beurre et baguette mix) - hexes and ohs, goodbye friend, welcome lover - noise factory records
swap 7 - swap - complot
murpt - 4th year - wabi recordings (out of print)
pkluka - save your fork, there's pie! - piehead records (out of print)
knee deep in a puddle of rain mix - unravelled brown cassette tape lying on a freeway, standing in the rain remix ep - unravelled recordings (out of print)
orialis - no. 2 - noise factory records (out of print)
brittle sticks - no. 2 - noise factory records (out of print)
sksma - fr01 - future rhetoric recordings (out of print)
untitled - fr02 - future rhetroic recordings (out of print)
decompost - black - a/s systems
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media
live @ mutek - may 2007
live @ almost live music series - nov. 2006
^^ [right-click / save target as...]
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2008 live dates:
07/19/2008 - lab.synthese - montreal, CA
06/24/2008 - the central - toronto, CA
05/08/2008 - the central - toronto, CA
03/15/2008 - alex p. keaton - london, CA
03/14/2008 - natchmusik - toronto, CA
03/09/2008 - wavelength - toronto, CA
01/04/2008 - 647 king street west - toronto, CA
01/01/2008 - lab.synthese - montreal, CA
select 2000-2007 dates:
12/31/2007 - interchange nye - montreal, CA
12/30/2007 - ckut-fm 90.3 - montreal, CA
07/07/2007 - harbourfront centre/beats breaks and culture festival - toronto, CA
05/31/2007 - mutek festival/cafe electronica - montreal, CA
03/30/2007 - toibar - toronto, CA
03/29/2007 - ryerson university, ckln-fm - toronto, CA
03/28/2007 - musicworks, canada council 50th anniversary celebrations - toronto, CA
12/02/2006 - pedal to the metal 4 - toronto, CA
11/10/2006 - toronto alternative art fair international - toronto, CA
10/06/2006 - freehouse lounge - ottawa, CA
10/04/2006 - salon daome - montreal, CA
09/23/2006 - x avant festival - toronto, CA
07/16/2006 - musicworks magazine fundraiser - toronto, CA
06/03/2006 - le placard/mutek - montreal, CA
05/30/2006 - upgrade/mutek - montreal, CA
03/03/2006 - canadian music week - toronto, CA
01/14/2006 - alex p keaton - london, CA
11/11/2005 - soundplay festival - toronto, CA
10/15/2005 - radio liberation - paris, FR
09/07/2005 - transmedia 2005 launch - toronto, CA
07/09/2005 - beats breaks & culture festival - toronto, CA
06/25/2005 - re:union festival - wilno, CA
06/04/2005 - mutek festival - montreal, CA
04/09/2005 - terrain vague cd launch - quebec city, CA
02/19/2005 - phoniq.net launch - montreal, CA
11/27/2004 - u/ctrl tour - montreal, CA
11/26/2004 - u/ctrl tour - quebec city, CA
11/25/2004 - u/ctrl tour - ottawa, CA
11/24/2004 - u/ctrl tour - guelph, CA
11/23/2004 - u/ctrl tour - st. catherines, CA
11/22/2004 - u/ctrl tour - london, CA
11/21/2004 - u/ctrl tour - toronto, CA
11/20/2004 - u/ctrl tour - hamilton, CA
11/19/2004 - green nights orange days cd launch - toronto, CA
11/06/2004 - green nights orange days cd launch - montreal, CA
06/20/2004 - om festival - toronto, CA
09/28/2003 - pop montreal festival - montreal, CA
07/11/2003 - teknival festival - bancroft, CA
06/21/2003 - om festival - kiloue, CA
11/23/2002 - cbc radio noise factory records showcase - ottawa, CA
11/11/2001 - stained, a month of sundays - toronto, CA
press
WIRE (UK) May 2007
naw - City Saturate - Noise Factory Records
The follow-up to Neil Wiernik's memorable Green Nights, Orange Days release from 2004 opens with "Harbourline Rendered", an oily iridescent spectrum of sustained notes floating across its surface. It's a contrasting mood to the standout track "5am West Bound" a set of well placed clicks and clear-cut beats that is neatly echoed in Tomas Jirku's "As West As It Gets" closing remix. In between Wiernik works his way systematically through a set of ringing metallic mediations on a single theme, clustered principally around the three part "City Saturate" series at the album's center. Looped and reworked into different speeds and rhythms, it demonstrates how a conceptually minimalist approach doesn't automatically lean less. - Ken Hollings
Grooves (USA) May 2007
naw - City Saturate - Noise Factory Records
Toronto electronic composer and self-described audio contortionist Neil Wiernik has long been interested in sound ecology, landscapes, and environments. However, while his last two discs Green Nights Orange Days and The Resound of a Foggy Autumn Dawn celebrated the simple unfettered joys of escaping it in the great outdoors with tracks like Penny Fishing North of Bay, Mid Winter Sailboat Ride, and Campfire Cricket Melodies, on City Saturate, Wiernik switches from the rural to the urban, turning his attention to one of the most dreaded tasks of any working adult: the daily commute along a major highway.
City Saturate is an audio chronicle of a daily commute over a 12 hour period, from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. As anyone who has made a back-and-forth trek along our increasingly clogged thoroughfares knows, a suitable soundtrack to deal with the always potential road rage would be perhaps a mixed CD of Merzbow, Atari Teenage Riot, some speed metal, and some gabba. That said, Wiernik begins City Saturate on a more optimistic note. The luminescent and glowing ambience of Harbourline Rendered encapsulates the hope and buoyancy that comes with an early morning sunrise and the prospect of a fresh start. Just as with his previous albums as Naw, Wiernik sticks to the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction, humid dub-house/minimal-techno template that has served him so well. So 5 A.M. West Bound is driven by a 4/4 groove, skittering percussion, garbled, clashing radio-like voices, and panning, ping ponging Fender Rhodes pulses. Judging from 5 A.M., Wiernik appears to have taken a page from the calm and serenity of Kraftwerks landmark album Autobahn.
However, once in the city, as on Sunstained Viaduct Passages, the sleek ride hits some bumps, as the claustrophobic density of urban sprawl takes over, with the sounds becoming grittier, grainer, and murkier, the tempo ever slower, the keyboard melodies more metallic. This dread continues on the title track triptych and Elbow Landlock, as the beats, clicks, and cuts grow more skeletal and pointillistic, the melodies hazier and more diffuse until the weariness and fatigue of the gridlock sets in on crawling space-out dub of Potholes, Railroad Cracks and Sidewalk Smack and the sheer exhaustion of the trip home on 5 P.M. East Bound. Tomas Jirkus upbeat re-mix of 5 A.M. West Bound is the only misstep here: Tacked on at the end, it not only seems disingenuous but also unnecessary. That said, City Saturate perfectly captures the existential cycle of the daily commute into the big city and the accompanying physical and mental
toll it exacts on all of us. - Richard Moule
e/i (USA) June 2007
naw - City Saturate - Noise Factory Records
The felicitously dubbed echo chamber, and its more sophisticate successors, has surely proved electronic musics most enduring technology. As once characterized by David Toop, it serves variously as landscape paintbox, time stretcher, resonance amplifier, and warp factor. Toronto-based Neil Wiernik has clearly spent lengthy spells of his decade in electronic music in his chambers, so to speak, for his NAW project is shamelessly echo-steeped ambient-dub-techno, virtually auto-referencing Basic Channels similarly inclined explorations, and seemingly rejoicing in its tradition. That said, City Saturate has a more reflective downtempo orientation, giving more space for articulation of Wierniks professed interest in sound-environment linkages. The Vorsprung Durch Techno of Von Oswald & Ernestuss vehicle had something of the precision-tooled chug of Kraftwerks autobahn, but Wierniks customization, though similarly engineered, with those BC/CR trademark metallic recursive synth-stabs, has more the feel of an updated blues of backwoods urban postmodern; a deep-chorded minor key anhedonia, with bass bumps and kicks coming and going to spring things into languid motion.
In this respect, it surpasses the more generic minimal house of 2004s Green Nights Orange Days, being less bound by beat-template, freed for a more thorough archaeology of timbre. In mood its an in-between music for the ambivalent transition of dusk-night or dawn-morn. The cover art aerial photograph of a cityscape proves to be an imagist representation of NAW sound: like the BC colour-box, City Saturate has a deliberately restricted sound palette with similar sounds and themes running through a number of the tracks inter-referentially, eventually creating a koan-like almost meditative aural space. Its mastered fully by ex-MP tweak-worker Twerk, who manages to keep the resolution of its delay-infused sonic contours free from mud and gloop. Tomas Jirku provides a 12-minute dance-spin on 5 AM West Bound, which serves to throw the rest of the album into a twilit relief, as deeper, more delicate. - Alan Lockett
XLR8R (USA) May 2007
naw - Cracked Lines and Broken Signals EP - Sentient Sound
Fans of Basic Channel and Plus 8 should definitely check out the recent output of Sentient Sound. Its latest release, NAWs Cracked Lines and Broken Signals EP, sums up the labels subtle techno modus operandi.
Gentle melodies, rubbery bass, and echoed keys penetrate four solid tunes. NAW is the work of Montreal ex-pat Neil Wiernik. - Tomas Palermo
WIRE (UK) May 2005
naw - Green Nights Orange Days - Noise Factory Records
Based in Montreal, Neil Wiernik has been customising equipment and tweaking software for some years now, taking minimal techno to deeper levels and bringing new complexities to dub and post-house production values. Mastered by Twerk in San Francisco, Wiernik's sound has the kind of sharpness and clarity usually lost amid the murk and decay of clicks and cuts and digital delays. "Railroading After Dark" opens with a bold interplay of frequencies, stacking repeated incidents on top of each other without losing overall coherence. "Penny sifting North On Bay" keeps its measures discreet without disappearing entirely. It's what his tracks won't do that becomes more interesting. - Ken Hollings
Grooves (USA) November 2005
naw - Green Nights Orange Days - Noise Factory Records
Neil Weirnik may have a Canadian passport, but his music's ancestry is definitely German - 90s minimal tech-house dub from Cologne or Berlin, to be precise. But while the austere, sleek techno of Basic Channel evoked the precision and speed of racing along the autobahn, Wiernik's crisp clicks, warm bass throbs, and melodic synth patches imply a more leisurely approach to movement.
So it's hard not to hear the ice crackle underneath you as you glide across a frozen lake on the mystical "Mid Winter Sailboat Ride" and the more-anxious next track "Mid Winter Sailboat Rescue." Other exterior shots include a train's steam hiss on "Railroading after Dark," the cricket chirps on "Camp Fire Cricket Melodies," and the gentle lapping waves on the watery "Canal Lock Swim Lesson." Nothing epitomizes this leisurely approach more than the two tracks that bookend the disc: "Penny Fishing North of Bay" and "Penny Sitting North on Bay." The former, with its fishing-reel casting sounds, captures the excitement of pulling in the big one, while the glitchy ambience of the latter expresses perfectly the serenity and peacefulness of reclining at the end of a dock without a care in the world. - Richard Moule
XLR8R (USA) December 2002
naw - The Resound Of A Foggy Autumn Dawn - Noise Factory Records
Although the curtain rises to a setting of grim, distant prose, Naw's foggy autumn dawn breaks rather warmly. Throughout this subdued drama of trailer park dub-glitch, an optimism of sorts hangs on like a leaf hugging its bare November branch. Even muffled undertones of "I Feel Love" linger here, as though that soaring light has burrowed underground, hibernating in anticipation of a loveless winter. Spare and simple, the gift in this album is a story line of comfort often missing in plotless, stream-of-electronic-consciousness laptop structures. Canadian Neil Wiernik comes to experimental techno through work as a multimedia visual artist and designer of software and sound-making devices. He is, perhaps, trained in the art of patience, allowing space to resound as fully as the music. - Justi Echeles
Surround Sounds: Excerpts from an Interview with NAW
Neil Adam Wiernik, or naw, has been a prolific and active figure in Canada's electronic music scene for over 10 years, with an impressive list of recorded work and live performances undertaken during that time. His work involves ongoing experimentation with sounds that cross over between genres of techno, dub, house, microsound and ambient. He has managed to create a distinctive sound, combining these influences in a genre-defying way.
The textural layers and seamlessness of genres in naw's music are reflections of the lived environment, bridging the subtlety of what happens between the beats to the changing of the seasons. Song titles evoke spaces and moods. From "camp fire cricket melodies" to "underpass tunnel corridors", physical and social surroundings play an important role in the construction of his music.
"The seamlessness has alot to do with the fact that alot of my music is influenced by the environments that I live in. When I say environment I mean everything like the way people interact with me and around me to the environment that I work in and reside in. There's alot of seamlessness in the way things occur in Montreal -the seasons are quite seamless, a slow seamless exchange of patterns."
Invoking relationships between environment, landscape, nature and music, the interest in reflecting and reconstructing the environment through technological means has been central in naw's work. His digitally synthesized sounds are uncannily organic, achieving an effect of tangibility not often heard in electronic music.
"In terms of my music being very organic sounding but digitally created, thats an interesting juxtaposition that I've always had with my music. My music's always been about the environment - I've always been interested in sound ecology and I've always investigated that end of things in my music, whether it be my completely abstract music done in the early 90's and late 80's or the more structured stuff as naw when naw was born in 1995. It's always interested me to take the concept of something organic and either try to manipulate it digitally or reproduce that organic environment digitally."
One constant element admist the other layers and sounds in naw's music is the deep reverberations of dub. We can't talk about his music without recognizing it's relationship to the pioneers of dub techno who inspired him, the artists behind Basic Channel and Chain Reaction. But besides the dub techno influence, he also looks back to the fundamental technique of dub as inspiring his own approach to music making in many ways.
"Dub is a very organic type of music - in my opinion it's one of the first musics that tried to fuse that idea of the organic with the digital. Dub is a studio project where a producer is taking the sounds being produced by these musicians and manipulating them in the studio. And whipping up a digital frenzy with effects and recording techniques. You can hear that idea in my music, to me that's the beginning of the idea of juxtaposing the organic into the digital and thats where dub has always been a big influence on me."
Given the diversity of styles represented in naw's music, pinpointing where his music belongs is a difficult task. Rather than try to define it, maybe it's better to take a step back and simplify.
I just say that I make electronic music or not even, its computer generated music. Monolake, an artist who has had a huge influence on me over the years, never tries to classify his music. Other people try. I've assimilated that attitude towards my music. Because my music doesn't really find a home in a hard techno party or at an ambient event, it has a little too many elements of everything in there. In a way I find I have more in common emotionally with my music with say an IDM artist or even an indie rock artist that is fusing electronics with guitar oriented music only for the fact that there's a lot of grey in there in terms of where does this music get classified.
This interview was conducted by DJ Cyan/Corina MacDonald in November 2004 for Modular Systems on CKUT Radio 90.3 fm / Montreal.