nównøis “my biggest inspiration — overthinking”

Last time I spoke to nównøis, the London-based Hungarian artist and producer, she had just released her debut EP, “verses”. Almost a year later, three EPs in, we are here again, this time celebrating the release of her debut album. Set to go live today, TASTE IT is a deliberate DIY feast. One that should satisfy the ears of many, always-hungry fans of independent music. The big reveal continues tonight with the live launch of the album at The Waiting Room in London. nównøis, who says she writes music for “people who like being alone”, this time, is inviting everyone to join. And I really wish I could be there.

The last months, almost a year, led nównøis to the fruitful completion of TASTE IT which not only included recording herself, but also producing two other featured artists – Andy Hill of The Subtheory, and Valentina Reptile. Sitting somewhere between trip hop, experimental electronica, dark R&B and avant-pop, it is mostly about the experience of sharing the solitude, though. As well as the darkness, and the possibility of finding something valuable within it.

Without revealing too much, though, for me personally, the 20 songs included on TASTE IT are a way of dealing with emotions which emerge while listening to the myriad of self-made sounds. The elements of beats built from the recordings of everyday objects magnify that state of self-induced solitude. Like an invitation to feel alone, but together, as contradictory as it may sound. Which is exactly where nównøis is now – about to open her world to others with the live performance of TASTE IT. And this is also where this story gets its continuation and a new life. This is the next step in. If you are in London tonight, make sure to join her (links below!).

BARTEK: I have just finished listening to your album and, WOW, it has been quite an emotional ride! Dark, minimalistic, deeply personal and – I’m not sure if you agree with me – occasionally psychedelic?

nównøis: I’m happy you noticed. I wasn’t consciously trying to make a psychedelic record, but I think something happens when vocals stop behaving like lyrics and become texture, or when familiar everyday sounds are manipulated until you can’t immediately recognise where they came from. One of the main reasons I wanted to collect these songs and pieces on one album was to introduce a less vocal-focused side of me, too — or to experiment with my vocals without always using actual lyrics. I think the more instrumental world of nównøis revealed something more abstract in the project.

BARTEK: How did you feel when you reached that moment of saying to yourself: “This is it, the album is finished and ready”?

nównøis: I didn’t. At one point I simply thought, okay, from this moment on I’m just ruining everything. That’s when I stopped and decided it was ready. Not perfect, but the best I could do at that moment. And luckily, I had a deadline stopping me from tweaking the songs a little more.

BARTEK: You wrote, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered TASTE IT yourself. Why was it important to keep the final mixing and mastering decisions in your own hands rather than handing the album over to someone else?

nównøis: I could have chosen to have it professionally mixed or mastered. It wasn’t really a financial decision. Thanks to the support of my listeners, I had raised enough through a GoFundMe campaign to have that option, but I ultimately found myself putting much of it back into studio hire and the work itself. What I realised while making the album was that very small changes in balance, dynamics, space or tone could completely change what a song meant to me. At some point I stopped experiencing mixing as the technical stage that comes after writing and started seeing it as part of the composition itself. That isn’t me undervaluing mixing or mastering engineers at all. Quite the opposite — learning to do that work myself made me understand much more deeply how much judgement, experience and craft those professions involve. But for this particular album I wanted to follow those decisions all the way through myself. I’ve spent roughly three years teaching myself recording, production, mixing and mastering. The goal wasn’t to prove I could make a perfect record. It was to make the best record I was capable of making at this exact point in time.

BARTEK: TASTE IT contains twenty tracks and brings together material written across several years. Why did these songs need to become one album rather than remain separate singles and EPs?

nównøis: Because eventually I stopped hearing them as separate releases. There were repeated sounds, ideas, words and emotional states appearing years apart without me planning it. Some tracks shared samples. Some answered questions that appeared much earlier. Some only made sense to me once another song existed. The album versions also allowed me to revisit the older material from where I am now rather than pretending I’m the same producer I was three years ago. So, TASTE IT became less of a collection and more of a way of seeing the whole period at once.

BARTEK: I wonder if the recording of “note 26/12/22”, where you sing “so much time wasted”, has been a figurative starting point of your work on TASTE IT?

nównøis: We could interpret it like that. I find it hard to add short explanations to my songs because they usually carry several different meanings for me. The original idea here was indeed about procrastination, but it gradually turned into something about not being understood, and therefore not feeling fully supported in a relationship — and how much energy we can waste trying to explain ourselves. It absolutely belongs to the theme and journey of TASTE IT. I kept the audio from the original video recording of me sitting on top of the toilet and playing guitar. It ends with the sound of my family arriving home. I think that says quite a lot about how this album was made.

BARTEK: When I listen to the album as a whole, I am impressed by all the foley-style samples which sound “found” or collected. How much time did the sound design take you to complete? I had a feeling that this process must have been extremely important to you.

nównøis: When I first started producing my own music, after two or three songs I found the sound banks available to me a little boring. I don’t know — I just wanted to hear something I hadn’t heard before. Even more than that, I wanted to create my own sound. I was inspired by a wonderful artist, Kelly Ann Buckley, and started using the Koala app to record all kinds of noise and whatever sound I found interesting enough. I’ve been doing that for around four years now, and TASTE IT carries that whole journey. Some of the sounds on the album have been with me and changing shape for four years. Others are very recent. Some songs were produced in a day or a week. Some took years to finish. Or maybe not even to finish — to accept them as one version of that idea.

BARTEK: There is a very domestic, private quality to the way this album was made — phone recordings, everyday noises, music created around family life. How much did the circumstances in which you were making it become part of the sound itself?

nównøis: A lot. There was never really a separation between “life” and “studio”. I recorded whenever I could, wherever I could. Sometimes that meant working around children, household noise, exhaustion or very small windows of time. Eventually I stopped seeing those circumstances only as obstacles. The house, the corridor, objects around me, interruptions, accidental sounds — they all started entering the music. The “note 26/12/22” recording ending with my family arriving home is probably the most obvious example, but the whole album carries traces of the life around it.

BARTEK: While listening to TASTE IT, I had the impression that the songs which were already featured on your three EPs received a “gentle” makeover. For example, “don’t touch my darkness”. What is the story and your reasoning behind making those changes?

nównøis: I spent a few weeks trying to remix the already released tracks, and my biggest inspiration — overthinking — kicked in really hard. I ended up with versions I didn’t even like. My original goal was to create completely new versions that would only exist on the album, but I hadn’t realised how much my production and mixing had changed since some of those releases. When I put the older and newer material next to each other, I suddenly heard everything differently. And sometimes I realised I had already got the best out of a song. So now there are gently remixed versions, some that are mostly remastered, some completely different versions, and some previously unreleased songs. I can explain the reason behind pretty much every one of those decisions.

BARTEK: Let’s talk about the overall sound of the album. It felt to me that the use of silence was very intentional and purposeful as part of the minimalistic arrangements. Could you talk a bit about the reasons behind this choice for the album as a whole?

nównøis: While revising the songs, I sometimes took away even more while adding something different. I deliberately left more space here and there: a missing word, beat, bass sound or vocal. I think while working on these versions I became more accepting than I was when I originally wrote some of them. Silence also leaves a little room for the listener to complete something themselves. Almost like the whole album is the shinobu version of nównøis.

BARTEK: In “i can feel my heartbeat” you took on a role of not only the vocalist in a collaboration, but also a producer for another artist, Andy Hill of The Subtheory. How did you find yourself in that role, and is this something you would like to pursue further?

nównøis: Absolutely. I loved it. A year ago, I was still scared of touching my own vocals — I did it anyway — so I think becoming comfortable enough to produce someone else felt like a natural progression. The reason I originally asked Andy to write a verse for this song was that his voice was already sampled in the production. I actually built the whole song around this sample. And I think that was also the first moment I felt it was time to open up my world a little and let go of the fear that I wasn’t good enough to let anyone into the process before I thought everything was presentable.

BARTEK: “Now that I know how it feels to be me, I’m floating”, you sing in “floating”, towards the end of the album. Sounds like an important mantra to me. How long did it take you to get to this point in your life, and what does this mean to you, artistically speaking?

nównøis: “floating” was originally released as my third single in 2023, and I built it around an even older vocal idea. The first version came out after around three years of being a mum. Maybe that’s related. On the album it appears close to the end, after a lot of struggle, and it feels like reaching some kind of acceptance. But like a lot of nównøis songs, there is also a more literal symbolic meaning underneath it. For me, sometimes a version of you has to die before another one can appear.

BARTEK: When you talk about “finding something valuable in the noise”, what do you mean in terms of its significance?

nównøis: “Valuable” might not even be the right word. “Useful” sounds too practical and somehow degrades what I mean. The sound just needs to be interesting enough to make me stop. I hear something other people might dismiss as noise and immediately start wondering what else it could become. So yes, going back to one of the earlier questions, it can take a huge amount of time to test sounds, shape them, swap them for something else, chop them, trim them, process them, mix them and sometimes start all over again. I do have a few nównøis drum kits saved now, though. You might hear the same sound appearing in several songs without necessarily recognising it. And there are also a few sounds sent to me by other people which I’ve been lucky enough to play around with, so I’d like to give them credit too.

BARTEK: You also talk about the purpose of the darkness as “the possibility of finding something valuable within it”. What is the one, most important thing that you would like your listeners to take away after the last sound of the album has faded out?

nównøis: I know I’m probably supposed to say something profound here, but I don’t really want to be responsible for anyone else’s feelings. Maybe we should ask them how they feel. I’d rather leave enough space in the album for somebody to find something in it that I never intended.

BARTEK: You seem to be drawing artistic freedom from the fact that not everything has to be flawless or immediately explainable. Your album is purposely DIY in that sense. Could you talk about the process of achieving this “peace of mind” in finding imperfections acceptable and, from the listeners’ perspective, being part of the album’s discovery process?

nównøis: Peace of mind. That made me laugh because I’m not very familiar with it. I think I’ve been following a path that somehow appeared in front of me, and to stay on it I’ve had to become braver. There was a voice telling me to finish this album alone and say: here it is — nównøis now, ready for the criticism. I needed to do that if I actually wanted to improve and stop wasting time, because too often I let self-doubt control my choices. So maybe you’re right and I have reached some kind of peace of mind after all. But I also often prefer demos, unfinished ideas and first takes to something overthought and polished. So why not release that?

BARTEK: I really like the fact that you define TASTE IT as an “invitation to come closer” rather than an expectation of any immediate understanding. In that sense, I feel like what you’re saying is that there is much more to come after this first taste. What are your plans in this regard?

nównøis: Exactly. This album isn’t just the closure or result of a song-writing period. It’s also the first step towards letting other people in, getting back on stage properly, experimenting more with the live set and exploring how this album can change through performance. Inviting guest musicians to the launch was another step in that direction, as were collaborations with Valentina Reptile and Andy Hill. I still want nównøis to remain fundamentally a solo project, but I’m interested in what happens when that world occasionally opens up to other people.

BARTEK: Where is TASTE IT going to take you this year, and in 2027?

nównøis: After the launch, TASTE IT will keep evolving. I’ll be taking the project on a small run of shows, with full details coming after 13 November. The launch itself is really a first taste of what comes next: developing the nøispatch further, expanding selected songs into band versions, creating more collaborations, possibly producing for other artists, and continuing to develop the live side of the project. I think the main goal is less about reproducing the record exactly and more about finding out what these songs become once they leave my room.

LINKS:

The album launch: https://link.dice.fm/G3ff77398d90

Subvert: https://www.subvert.fm/nownois/taste-it

Bandcamp: https://nownois.bandcamp.com/album/taste-it

Website: https://www.nownois.com/nownois-live