Nadia Volt's 'Overcurrent' Is Synth-Pop With Teeth

The worst thirty seconds on 'Overcurrent' arrive at 2:48 in 'Thermal'. The chorus lands, the polysynth is supposed to open into a wide major chord, and two of its eight voices have drifted so far sharp that the chord does not resolve. It curdles. Nadia Volt, singing to an instrument that was in tune when the take started, is stranded between two tunings and audibly deciding whether to follow the machine or hold her ground. She holds. They kept it.

I have played that moment to four people. Two winced, two asked what it was, and nobody was indifferent, which is more than most synth-pop released this year manages across an entire side.

A machine with a fever curve

The instrument is a Corvid 8, an eight-voice polysynth built in 1981 and never built well. Its tuning circuit drifts as the case warms, the auto-tune button stopped working at some point in the previous century, and after roughly twenty minutes powered on, voice three sits about a quarter tone sharp while voice six goes the other way. Which voice plays which note depends on the order you press the keys. The machine is, in effect, a different instrument in minute one and minute ninety, and nobody can predict which chord will be the ugly one.

Volt did not fix it, hire a technician or reach for a tuner plugin. She wrote a fever chart. Side one was tracked cold, inside the first twenty minutes of each session, and it is bright, tight and almost conventional. Side two was tracked after two hours with the lid on, and it sags and smears and occasionally sounds like a fairground closing. Listened to in order, the record has a physical arc that nothing in the lyrics has to explain: the instrument gets tired, and the songs get stranger as it does.

Why the flaw works as a hook

Detuning is already the engine of pop. Chorus pedals, doubled vocals, stacked saw waves, tape wow: the entire toolkit exists to make one pitch sound like several that nearly agree. What is different here is direction. Ordinary detuning is symmetrical and static, a fixed width of shimmer. The Corvid's is one-way and cumulative, so a chord's colour at the end of a song is not the colour it had at the start.

'Cold Start' is the clearest demonstration. It opens genuinely clean, almost prim, and across three and a half minutes the pad widens without a single automation move until the last chorus is a full quarter tone thick. Nothing was added. The room got warm. That is a structural device most producers would need three plugins and a lyric to fake.

The songs underneath

None of this would matter if the songs were weak, and this is where 'Overcurrent' separates itself from the large pile of records where a malfunctioning object is the entire pitch. 'Fuse' is a proper song: a verse that moves, a chorus built on wide intervals that gives the drift somewhere to be audible, and a lyric about a hallway light that keeps tripping, which Volt refuses to make into a metaphor for anything until the last line, at which point she makes it into a metaphor for everything.

Her writing is plain and appliance-shaped throughout, all fuses and thermostats and standby lights, and she never once gets cute with it. The demo of 'Fuse', tracked before the synth went wrong, will be on the next tape club cassette, and it is instructive to hear: same chords, same voice, no fever, and about half the record.

Where the trick runs out

Two tracks are the malfunction and nothing else. 'Ten Minute Warm-Up' is precisely what the title promises and would have made a good interlude at ninety seconds rather than a poor track at four. 'Overcurrent' itself, the closer, mistakes chaos for climax, and when every voice has gone somewhere different there is nothing left to push against.

There is a practical problem too. This album cannot really be played live, because the machine will not do the same thing twice and a support slot will not wait twenty minutes for it to reach temperature. Volt has said she will not use software emulations of her own synth, which is either principled or stubborn, and probably both. In the meantime 'Cold Start' has been in heavy rotation on the radio stream for a fortnight, usually somewhere around three in the morning, where the drift sounds less like a fault and more like a decision.

That curdled chorus in 'Thermal' is still the worst thirty seconds on the record. It is also the passage I have played most, which is the only kind of flaw worth keeping.