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Echoes of Breakage is the debut album from New York’s NOMON, the sister duo of percussionists Shayna and Nava Dunkelman. Building on the deft collision of traditional Asian sounds, electronics, and contemporary percussion music established on the duo’s 2021 EP Card II, the new album captures dramatic artistic growth and sonic expansion. The duo’s deep roots in percussion music have been increasingly complimented by the seamless incorporation of electronics and long-form compositional ideas. They’ve arrived at a bracing marriage of past, present, and future, making sense of disparate individual musical practices. Echoes of Breakage boldly elides any sort of stylistic convention, instead tapping into instinct and careful listening to bring seemingly incongruous ideas together, whether it’s how gamelan-inspired breakdowns are subsumed by moody electronic soundscapes or the way they build slow-build dramatic tension through meticulously measured interaction where every gesture is carefully weighted.

Both musicians are integral figures in various overlapping musical communities in New York. Shayna has nonchalantly straddled different milieus, effortlessly moving between pop and rock projects including Ali Sethi, Xiu Xiu, and Balún on one hand, new music artists like Du Yun, Paolo Prestini, and the late Jóhann Jóhansson on the other. Nava, six years younger than her sister, gravitated toward improvised music, where she’s worked with guitarist Fred Frith, violinist gabby fluke-mogul, and guitarist Brandon Seabrook. She’s also been heavily involved in experimental and interdisciplinary collaborations with the likes of Pauchi Sasaki, yuniya edi kwon, and Raven Chacon, while pursuing an experimental electro-percussion duo called IMA with electronics artist named Amma Ateria. More recently she has joined Shayna in working together with Du Yun. For most of their careers they operated in separate worlds, in different cities, but since the pandemic, when Nava left the Bay Area to join Shanya in New York, family bonds have pulled them closer together both personally and musically. The sisters grew up in Japan with their American father and their Indonesian mother, a performer and composer who is currently active as a facilitator of community art and music. As kids they often joined her, adding percussion and gamelan instruments to her new age-inspired music. Both sisters emigrated to the US for studies, but they each carried the music of their mother with them as they embarked on diverse career paths.

Shanya initiated NOMON prior to the pandemic, but the duo really found its footing when Nava moved to New York. Shayna’s growing interest in composition led her to enlist her sister for a project where she could both be herself and be challenged, in addition to celebrating the natural choreography and physicality of percussion playing through their parallel motion. For Nava, it became an opportunity to engage with enfold electronics within her percussion array to transform sounds in real time — and more importantly, a platform for her emerging interest in composition. Additionally, Echoes of Breakage is a self-produced recording, with each musician spending time digging into production and mixing to fully translate their ideas into sound. A number of the pieces reflect childhood experiences, especially the role their mother played in inspiring life-long interests in music. In fact, Nava’s piece “Amaranth” features their mother Celia Dunkelman on organ. “We both realize that our mother's music influenced us in ways that are obvious and not obvious,” says Shayna. “I think it's really an exploratory album in terms of how we influence each other and how we could take that to the next level.” 

Each sister wrote pieces for the album, assembling and fine-tuning materials through regular performances and rehearsals, although NOMON essentially went dark over the last year as they made the new album. “We have this mirroring component,” explains Nava, pointing out how their respective percussion set-ups project inverse imagery, where simultaneous gestures bring an arresting visual element to live performances, where audiences can see how deeply integrated their work is. In fact, their joint composition “Red & Blue” reflects a deep give-and-take, half percussion battle, half collaborative play. It’s an idea that turns up more elaborately in the album’s title piece. “I always had the idea of going back and forth, a kind of call and response,” says Nava.

Nava took advantage of a Loghaven Artist Residency to create new pieces for the duo, while the title piece, a deliberate effort to craft a long-form work, and “Amaranth” were part of a Roulette commission. “Because this was the first time I composed for NOMON with electronics, I was thinking a lot about the ‘breakage’ of myself — learning something new, but also integrating what’s already within me. I felt like I was going through a panorama of memories while composing this: starting with soundscapes that felt familiar, weaving in melodies and rhythms that had always echoed in my head, and unfolding with new elements. I also wanted to compose something that feels conversational between Shayna and me with the percussion. I liked the feeling of going through that memory journey together.” It’s a multipartite gem, as gamelan-inflected rhythms weave through churning electronic patterns, and sparkling synth melodies launch a shape-shifting excursion marked by NOMON’s dynamic interplay.

Both sisters openly channeled old influences into their pieces. Shanya’s hooky “Uncover” is an old song that she had originally written for her group Peptalk, but her arrangement radically transforms the tune. “Emotionally, growth and independence feels evident here,” she says. “When I originally wrote this song nearly a decade ago I was obsessing over exotica and escapism, in general. Trying to figure out why one would crave the sense of belonging and find a place to call home, even if that meant borrowing or immersing themselves in a borrowed identity.” The piece “the girl who became a deer” stretches back even further, bringing music to a childhood memory of pretending to be a deer in a traditional Indonesian dance performance.

Echoes of Breakage is a celebration of family that uses a wide assortment of tools, styles, and rhythms unbound by any single tradition, era, or aesthetic. In NOMON Shayna and Nava Dunkelman push one another and coalesce, trusting their guts to meld their ideas into richly unified pieces that don’t concern themselves with genre. Instead it delivers a perfect marriage of pleasure, rigor, and experimentation, rejecting any notion that such things are mutually exclusive.