Description
When Noonzy - Antwerp songwriter Arnaud
Stockbroekx - first put on the shiny
turquoise jumpsuit, something clicked. The
garishness of the outfit was like a child's idea of
what a rock star should look like: glittering Lurex, Bowie-esque
lightning bolt, shocking-pink fringes, Nehru collar.
The strange contrast between this
innocent pre-teen daydream and the
brilliantly grotesque reality of a grown man who
recreates this dream illustrates what Noonzy and his music are all about:
at once wistful and playful, self-mocking and extravagant, all
undermined with an absurdist slant that the Belgian surrealists would approve of.
Ceci
n'est pas une rock star. This is not a rock star - this is
a phantasmagorical reinvention of the rock star trope; a cheerful, sugary subversion of the
hypermasculine rock star cliché. Welcome to the
Noonzyverse.
Noonzy’s EP Puppies comprises five infectious, elegantly crafted avant-pop songs, the EP glides from love-flushed longing (‘Where/When’) to the pleasures and pitfalls of being a lone ranger (‘Fishy’) to a blazing desire for tangible relationships with people (‘Mama Mia’). Impulsively catchy, the songs twinkle and cascade with exuberant expressive basslines and hazy analogue synths, simultaneously evoking the carefree leisure of youth and the spiky anxieties of our modern disconnected age.
Noonzy spent a number of months reworking the lo-fi songs he’d previously recorded, ‘going off into these deep, deep rabbit holes’, adding layers of synths and digital strings before dialling everything back down again, ‘boiling the songs down to their essence.’ In the most radical reworking, ‘Mama Mia’ retains only the drums and vocals from the original recording, giving way to softly whirring synth waves, melodica and a buoyant, beautifully unpredictable bassline. You can hear the care and attention that has gone into these songs, and yet at no point do they feel overlaboured. To retain that lightness of touch after countless revisions is testament to Noonzy’s natural skill and self-awareness as a songwriter, honed over years treading the boards in the pubs and clubs of Flanders.
