A collaboration between Jose Macabra and Nicola Serra, NosoKoma uses disquieting soundscapes to conjure the spectre of dark ontology, a shadowy realm in which the question “What is it?” is always bidirectional, pointing simultaneously at objects out in the world and the inner recesses of our own subjectivity.
Can knowledge ever be extricated from desire?
Although modern scientific inquiry aspires to objectivity, purifying the will to know of the word’s Biblical meaning is a struggle human beings lose over and over again, even when impersonal technologies like AI mediate their research.
As I immersed myself in Tarantos 20_24, I felt this problem keenly. Tracks like “Ritual of Mercy” would affect me differently depending on how I was listening to them—noise-cancelling headphones, Bluetooth speaker, vinyl—where I was, and, above all, my mood at the time.
It makes sense for people with my political convictions to be depressed right now: authoritarian populism, techno-feudalism, ecological crisis. And I continue to deal with struggles closer to home that compound my inclination to focus on clouds instead of their proverbial silver linings.
To me, Tarantos 20_24 often sounds like a factory where things are going horribly wrong, with broken rhythms, screeching noises, and voices that seem to be crying out in pain. Trying to figure out what I’m hearing becomes confused with what my mental state inclines me to hear.
That’s why, when I had the opportunity to interview Macabra and Serra for this piece, I told them that it struck me “as a dark album, full of dread.” Their response was illuminating, with all that word implies.
“We understand your sense of darkness or dread and recognise it as a valid, personal response,” they began, but stated that it wasn’t their intention.
“We’re careful with the word ‘dark.’ Instead of defining darkness as a style, we focus on unresolved or surprising moments. That instability might feel like dread or intensity. Art is personal, and we support those reactions.”
For NosoKoma, darkness goes beyond the button-pushing iconography that suburban rebels sport to feel dangerous.
“When we mention the occult with this record, we don’t mean belief systems, symbols, or shock value. We refer to the older meaning: the hidden or unseen. The record explores the unknown.”
That can be terrifying. Or exhilarating. Or both.
Some tracks on Tarantos 20_24 feature voices screaming, but as if heard from far away. Even in the absence of semantic content, it’s obvious that they come from a place where the release of tension is a distant mirage.
Others, like the third track “Tranxing King,” lean into the beat, with thundering polyrhythms that invoke prehistoric rituals.
Even the album’s most accessible song, “The Tear Mountain”, is veiled in mystery, recalling the dense, forbidding music that first-generation post-punk artists—think No Wave New York or the Berlin of Einstürzende Neubauten—made when they turned their back on commercial radio.
When asked about their connection to this long-ago music, NosoKoma answered that Tarantos 20_24 relates to it, “not as quotation but as a shared refusal of polish, stability, or conventional structure. Artists such as DNA, Lydia Lunch, and Arto Lindsay are certainly part of our listening vocabulary, alongside many others”.
The duo were kind enough to supplement their responses to my questions with a playlist–click here to listen–showcasing the wide range of music that inspired them when they were working on this project. Like Tarantos 20_24, it’s an intense listening experience, but also one that grows more complex and rewarding with each go-round.
From the interstellar trippiness of Abul Mogard’s “Tumbling Relentless Heaps” through classic post-punk bands like Neurosis and Swans to the jazzy underground hip-hop of Clipping, Macabra and Serra’s selections helped me to understand how their own soundscapes function as negative space, what keeps pulsing and scratching even when the traditional signifiers of musicality are under erasure.
This digital mixtape also reinforced a point NosoKoma was keen to make in our interview. While some of their inspirations reinforced the sense of existential gloom that I discerned in Tarantos 20_24, others did not.
Listening to the compilation helped me to appreciate the album’s open-endedness.
“The project began with long, improvised jam sessions. We spent hours recording in various rooms without rules or predetermined outcomes. The goal was to maintain the sensation of presence: listening, responding, and building together in real time. Many of those moments are irreproducible.”
For artists who work this way, the relationship between process and product can be fraught. When they release what they have been working on in physical form, the hard limit imposed by different formats—vinyl LP, cassette, compact disc—makes for difficult decisions.
Typically, the vast majority of those jam sessions end up on the cutting-room floor. Determining what is essential is time-consuming.
Tarantos 20_24 is another stellar example of how, in forcing artists out of their comfort zone, the global pandemic helped push their work in a different direction.
While Macabra and Serra had begun their collaboration prior to the shutdown, the change in their schedules gave them an opportunity to work methodically.
They followed up their improvisations with “a phase of deep listening, reviewing recordings, selecting, editing, and shaping them into tracks. The album balances improvisational energy with careful organisation”.
Having too much time to complete a project can lead to a finished product that feels fussy. But NosoKoma avoided this trap. One reason is that they are both deeply committed to the aleatory dimension of the public sphere.
Interdisciplinary artists who share an interest in the relationship between sound and ritual, Macabra and Serra aren’t bedroom musicians content to sit at home fixating on software.
Although both men settled in London, they brought with them an investment in the high-contrast world of their Mediterranean childhoods, Macabra in Spain and Serra in Sardinia. This quality has helped to distinguish their work, making it stand out in the city’s experimental music scene.
Macabra is known for live performances that are not for the faint of heart, invoking the radical aesthetic of Antonin Artaud.
Serra also gravitates to the collective experience of sound, curating the Dronica festival at the Old Church in the North London neighbourhood of Stoke Newington and collaborating with dancers.
“The record wouldn’t sound the same without the pandemic,” the duo told me. “Isolation, restrictions, and an altered sense of time shaped the music’s mood and process. The inward focus reflects what we all experienced. Limits changed our process. We spent more time with the material, listened more closely, and used what we had. This shaped the record’s sound.”
Prevented from producing soundscapes for an audience during the pandemic, they decided to turn inward, excavating subterranean expanses that capture the feeling of being held in the thrall of diegetic noise even when listened to over headphones.
“We were very conscious that this record would behave differently depending on how it was listened to,” NosoKoma explained to me. “Digital playback, especially through headphones, can be extremely focused and intense, almost invasive.”
While the first time listening to Tarantos 20_24 through headphones is definitely challenging, greater familiarity makes the music’s intensity bearable. More granular details “stick” with each run-through, helping turn the primordial sublime—peering over the edge of an abyss, staring out into the seemingly endless tumult of the ocean—into its aesthetic correlate.
We still recognise the danger, but also our desire to confront it.
“This isn’t music intended to function as background or at low volume, NosoKoma added. “A lot of what’s happening relies on physicality, resonance, and space.”
They want Tarantos 20_24 to retain the power to overwhelm, regardless of how the record is experienced.
“With certain kinds of sound, noise, heavy textures, unstable frequencies, reducing the volume also removes the bodily dimension. We’re not working in the territory of ambient music. Instead, we’re interested in the foreground, in sound that demands presence rather than passive listening.” In other words, “that intensity is part of the work, and we don’t see it as something to manage or dilute.”
That’s why NosoKoma were keen to release the album on vinyl, which “introduces a different relationship” between listeners and the music.
“The warmth, surface noise, and physical interaction with the record slow the experience down. The music in this case feels less surgical and more corporeal.”
Just the fact that you can’t listen to vinyl on the go, in the distracted mode through which most music is consumed these days, changes the experience. So does the inconvenience of playing records on a turntable, having to concentrate when dropping the needle and changing sides.
“Releasing the record on vinyl was important for that reason. Having the sound emerge from a physical, analogue object reinforces the idea of listening as an event rather than a stream. It changes how time is experienced, how attention is held, and how the music occupies space, drawing the listener into the core of the encounter, as we always intended.”
NosoKoma’s decision to make three videos to accompany Tarantos 20_24 also reflects their investment in diversifying how their collaboration can be experienced.
Directed by Macabra, with the help of Saen and They Said They Saw, these short films feature Piotr Bockowski, whose dancing brings out the ritual underpinnings of the music.
These videos don’t seek to explain Tarantos 20_24, to foreground one interpretation over others. On the contrary, they reinforce its open-endedness.
In his 1970 book S/Z, celebrated cultural critic Roland Barthes makes a distinction between texts with a well-defined structure and those that prioritise what he calls “structuration.” He strongly prefers the second kind because those texts invite each reader to remake them according to their needs and desires.
The authors of these latter texts do not try to control the reception of their work in perpetuity, but hand over the keys, secure in the knowledge that it will ultimately prove more significant if they don’t seek to limit the ways in which it signifies.
NosoKoma made a great album by taking this approach.
“We didn’t aim to make the record easy or hard to hear. We wanted to express our feelings at the time, like a sound diary. We didn’t consider genre or listener comfort, but chose honesty and spontaneity, and organised the music as a coherent experience.”
Tarantos 20_24 isn’t an easy record. It demands a lot of listeners. But it gives them far more in return.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
