As electronic music matures further past the clubs, the desire of artists to deconstruct and subvert the norms that have developed over the decades grows. As sub-genres and tropes spawn like branches on an ever growing tree, musicians stand ready to atomise and rearrange those new conventions, manipulating them, pushing them toward the furthest boundaries, seeing how far those rules will stretch into the left field. Halina Rice is one such musician...
Describing herself as working "at the intersection of art, music and technology", Halina Rice returns to her hometown and graces an appreciative Rescue Rooms with a relentless, hypnotic display of all three tonight, to varying degrees of success.
But first, supporting tonight are the duo of Londoner Frank Hopkins and Belgium-based Løgømyx. Separately, both men craft the kind of evocative, dynamic electronica that will be familiar to listeners of Jon Hopkins, Floating Points or Bicep. Together, they mesh their respective strengths into an assured, beautifully-paced and at times even ruminative set. Unafraid to toy with momentum beyond the familiar build-drop-break pattern, they instead allow their compositions to breathe, to ebb and flow quite dramatically in a way that feels cinematic. Wrangling with daunting-looking analogue synths, they craft texture from signal with a delicacy that matches their influences and proves that there is much warmth to be found amid the beat.
Preceding Rice’s set, a version of the artwork for her new album UNREALITY occupies the screen that takes up the entire back wall of the venue. It sees her figure static and alone, surrounded by a CG landscape that so nearly resembles a desert while the camera rotates endlessly. It’s an apt piece of artwork, indicative of her posture as an artist immersed in the digital.
With her face shaded by hair, Rice leans over her set-up in obvious and consummate control of every aspect of this multi-threaded experience. From the off, it’s an assault on the senses. That huge screen is almost too bright, the strobing colours pummelling your pupils as the image twists and distorts.
Like the sounds being conjured, the images are choppy and skittish, often threatening to resolve into something tangible, but just as easily disintegrating. The visuals are a barrage of presumably proceduraly generated fractal swirls and writhing shapes; geometric wire-frames giving way to nebulae of pixels, all washing over each other, colliding in time to the music.
The music is reminiscent of Holly Herndon’s soundscapes, albeit with a more definable structure underpinning the chaos. The new songs, such as ALTERED STATES sound excellent, allowed to unfurl before folding in on themselves, compacted into ever-increasing complexity, just like the accompanying visuals.
They are a perfect match in many ways. Rice’s music is a touch cold on face value, but resolves into clarity with attention, revealing dizzying amounts of layers and intricacy woven around the near constant beat. The images on display are as visually busy as the music is chaotic and just as intricate; the uncountable tendrils snaking out of distorted, glitching modernist digital sculpture matches well with the noise.
The shapes flash in such quick succession as to resemble that scene in A Clockwork Orange, flitting between style and mood on a whim. A slew of coloured cubes may appear like a 70s dance floor, before switching to a flat pixelated plane, which is then warped and given topography, turned into a Kid A-esque environmental scene before dissolving again into a flock of bird-like shapes, joined by solid tracking lines manically tracking their movement.
It’s almost overwhelming, until you acclimatise and start to let it wash over you instead of interrogating each image. If I had a criticism, it’s that the visuals are so intense, so ephemeral and so abstract that it threatens to become flat. There is very little to hold on to; very little nature and aside from a few clapping hands almost no human presence. Everything flashes by without any binding narrative, at times creating a beautifully-timed but emotionally insubstantial horror vacui.
Until late on, at least. ENDLESS bucks the trend of the evening, giving a welcome glimpse of a warmer side to Rice and her music. The song contains a bouncy, almost jaunty melody that sounds downright playful after a remarkably cohesive set full of hard-edged skittering. The visuals change, too, as the song’s video is displayed. It’s relatively sparse – a girl dancing in an abandoned warehouse – but after the hour of 2001 wormhole-style abstraction it coalesces with the music to create something softer, more inviting. It’s a door left ajar, and stepping through means the set ends on a high.
As I leave the venue, a nearby couple remark that “We definitely need to go to Berlin,” and I can think of no higher praise for an electronic gig that ultimately I admire greatly. It’s objectively incredible in the way Aphex Twin is. Halina Rice is deeply talented and clearly operating at a level of understanding higher than most producers. If she is able to refine the balance of skilful beat making and retain the humanity, she will prove to be an unmissable export Nottingham can be even more proud of.
Halina Rice performed at Rescue Rooms on 4th November 2025.
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