Short of the key to the city, receiving the title ‘honorary Scouser’ may be the greatest honour one could receive in a city where identity and history weigh heavy on the minds of the living (for this we are grateful). Liverpool is a city, a sanctuary and a humanitarian hub with a thriving cultural scene. Living in the belly of the beast, Toxteth, Nil00 is an anthropogenic parallel to her unique purpose and place. Lodge lane (aka. The centre of the universe) wields a sense of community unmatched, a bustling high street in a boarded up windows world, award winning international supermarkets, divine baklava, a sponge of the worlds culture tolerantly condensing the vast human experiences that comprise it into a neatly packaged 10 minute walk.
Galadrielesque in its eloquence, Nil00’s rhetorical finesse converts full meals into bite size Michelin nibbles. A newcomer to the scene, she manifests the experiences, attitudes and worlds that only growing up in Toxteth permits. Her sound is an escapist track-list for main-character building identity celebration in a social-realist dystopia. More than just a musician, a journalist, editor, and videographer, using a refined poetic dexterity, and acute cinematic understanding, Nil00 exudes a rose tinted kaleidoscopic fiction around her very essence.
We sat in her home studio as she was preparing to release her debut EP ‘00’. And, despite the frantic cat antics, we did get to talk about the music.
“The cat? Called Paula yeah. Named after this viral video, not proper viral - scouse viral. From the start of lockdown her family’s saying ‘Paula did you hear because of lockdown there’s no ale?’ and she’s going, ‘wha?!... this has gone too far now!’”
Hyper-pop occupies an ambiguous position, with its most conventional associations tied to Spotify gentrification and meme marketing. But, like all cultural incubators, some of the best ideas start as jokes or accidents, and evolve into a cultural force all their own, for an audience in a different world. Retaining its memetic foundation, hyper-pop is now a behemoth of online life, defining trends on and off the screen for a generation that sees no difference. The Shangri-la of an engaged LGBTQ+ scene, sonic-fusion, tolerance, and fan interaction, hyper-pop hooks the extremes of reality up to a warp drive, and teleports listeners to a new quantum paradigm as long as their eyes remain shut.
“My first experiences with making songs was making up little songs in school and singing them to little boys in my year to make them angry. I think that’s where I first learnt the power of song writing, watching this man turn puce. I just want to see what happens with the music. I am interested in expressing something else through music. I’m really into mystic poetry, and I think the reason I like music is you don’t really have to resolve things as well as words, and I’m not where I want to be with writing yet. I am obsessed with the music though, trying to focus on that as appose to what people will think can sometimes be tricky. It is hard not to get caught up in everything. It feels like there’s some things that belong to some people and you’re not a part of it, which is all so toxic. A life time of institutionalised capitalism will do that to you, always doing these calculations of hierarchy’s in your head’.”
“This EP was mostly co-produced with Yank Scally, my friend who lives round the corner. Most of the tunes on the ‘00’ EP have been finished with other people. Producing and working with other people really gives me the confidence to finish it you know. I defo wouldn’t be making music without Dylan (Yank Scally), I was making videos for him before I started making tunes.”
Taking a pit stop via Dylan’s house, picking up some necessities for a walk around Seffy Park, and bearing witness to their nonchalant and highly in-tune personal dynamic (Producer/artist duos know), we set out for greener pastures that happen to be where much of Nil00s visual experimentations are exercised. From purgatorial psychedelia, elated urbanism, and 110 lace swangin life force, Nil00’s visuals and sound are truly symbiotic.
In ‘Reject’, Nil00 weaponizes her sharpened cinematic vision to explore the transience of emotion, society, and existence. Portraying a too-often relatable longing for acceptance and fear of inescapable neglect. Performed cheerfully, the paranoiac sentiment is tied together with an upbeat bop arrangement c.o Dylan.
“For this EP I tried to have the progression from the first tune to the last, I like archetypal stuff you know like the hero’s journey. You go from a place of ignorance, so I tried to put my stupid negative ones at the start and get more positive throughout. I really feel like there is a cooperative energy of creativity that is available to those who seek it, for everything, even really trivial shit like what I’m doing. When it’s like that you feel differently about the stuff. You still have all the fluctuations of being like is this shit? Do I suck? Whatever. There’s a level of attachment and duty to it where you’re like alright I’ll show this to people…I guess. I deffo wouldn’t have put stuff out if I hadn’t had my mates. I just think when you’re with people you’re just having fun and in a flow. For me anyway, I’ve got issues with myself everyday but I can have a stable level of respect for my friends so that’s helpful. I started making music properly in lockdown, was bad and everything but I feel like, you know when people go to prison and come out well-learned? ahah it was similar to that.”
Ethereal club, angelic resonance, and punctual arrangement. Nil00s musical puzzle may not be complete but she knows where each piece is and where it is meant to go. Her aspirations aren’t reduced to one area and any lack of knowledge inspires her to learn further and adapt. A polymathic creative, and sponge-like inspiration. We should all be more like Nil00paidadvertisementdisclosure.
“I’m going to make a zine for the EP with lyrics, poems and some random nonsense I’ve written over the past few years ahah. Also wanting to make one of one clothing just with little designs. I make things that I don’t know how to make most the time. I’ve got that bad attitude where I’ll look at something and be like, ‘I could do that’. I end up having loads of projects on the go at once ahah. The better you get at things, you realise how bad you are at them.”
Across each work, Nil00 scatters fragments of herself among the manuscripts and code. Omnipotent in her creations, they are tied together in eternity by the values and care from which they were made. Fusing heart-warming micro-moments with mythological leviathans (usually colourful dragons) and futuristic realities, her ability to distort sound, manufacture a distilled biographical narrative, and dissect under-represented tribulations play on the lack of platform these quirks of existence have in mainstream thought circles.
In listening, Nil00’s music gives you a choice, absorb and evolve, or be taken by the current to a place you might not recognise. Probably a playground.
Animal hybrid:
I’d have wings obviously, you have to be able to fly. An enormous Raven crossed with… ahh this gonna looked so fucked up but a giraffe. Terrifying. The spirit…which animal has the most noble of spirit? Dogs but they’re not real are they, we made them like that! Probably a lion. There’s a really good William blake quote about lions, ‘The fox provides for himself but God provides for the lion’.
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