“Mister Divine” by Naytronix

Northern Transmissions 'Song of the Day' is the title-track "Mister Divine by Naytronix.

After recently announcing his new album ‘Mister Divine’, tUnE-yArDs bassist Nate Brenner, AKA Naytronix shares the record’s opener & title track. The album is due October 16th via City Slang.

Strangers to the touring life refer to it as “living the dream,” while generally the ones actually doing the touring see it more as living in a dream. The difference is subtle to the uninitiated, yet is intimate to Nate Brenner, AKA Naytronix, who has spent much of the past four years touring the world as bassist for tUnE-yArDs. Consider Naytronix’s second full-length, Mister Divine his treatise on the subject, which sees him turning from the disjointedly funky party dance anthems of his debut Dirty Glow (2012, Plug Research) to a surrealist stream of consciousness poignancy.

Conceived in tour busses, hotel suites, and basement studios initially as fodder for DJ sets, Mister Divine is the feeling of déjà vu between delirious post-show fevers and the road-torn sleep through the night on the way to the next city, driving the circumference of the Earth in nine weeks, dreams of Pangaea, of forever ago and infinity from now. Imagine: impossibly, and without the recollection of flying, you’re in Europe maniacally driving through the pre-dawn to catch the first ferry to Belgium, to Spain, to Sweden. There is Dur Dur on the stereo, William Onyeabor, Khaira Arby, and Dizzy K, compilations and mixtapes of unknown origin and content. This too is a dream, and tomorrow you’re starting over, another opportunity to bask in the irrelevance of the present moment, “all we have,” while keeping one eye on the future and one on the past.

Brenner has digested a lot in the three years since introducing this world to Naytronix. tUnE-yArDs has turned into something of a perpetual motion machine, taking him to far corners of the Earth, as well as Carnegie Hall and the TV sets of Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien and Jools Holland. He did some recording and performing with music royalty Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, got to collaborate and learn from Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda, and even found some time to take the Naytronix band around the US and across the Atlantic, from London to Istanbul.

While his music keeps its characteristic reflection of ‘70s Onyeabor and Bootsy Collins, there is a new facet of the sincerity and vulnerability of Arthur Russell amidst the psychedelia, as if wishing to land the Naytronix Mothership down to stay with us for a bit.

As music and life become one for the touring musician living (in) the dream, the line between plays and days gets more and more blurred. And in the Naytronix dreamland, no one’s there to dictate which is which.

Mister Divine tracklist

Mister Divine
Starting Over
Dream
Back in Time
The Wall
I Don’t Remember
Future
Living in a Magazine
Shadow

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