Review
Genre and Mood
Dusty Kid surprised everyone with Nemur (Walls of Guitars) (Extended Version). From a producer known for dark, driving techno comes a song that is closer to indie electronic pop: built on guitars, shaped with electronic patience and coloured by melancholic, reflective and heartfelt feelings. It is the moment the raver puts the headphones down and sings.
Song Summary
“Nemur” is a song of under five minutes placed at the end of a club album whose tracks run up to seventeen minutes. Guitars layer on top of each other, as the subtitle promises, into a shimmering wall of sound, while Lodde’s own vocal floats above with a fragile, almost private tone. The album credits list two guitarists, Dusty Kid himself and Francesco Lodde, and Dusty Kid on vocals. The production keeps the electronic producer’s sense of space and build, but the heart of the track is the warmth of the strings and the openness of the melody.
Musical Breakdown
The arrangement grows by stacking guitar on guitar, so the song gets bigger without ever getting louder in a club sense.
Intro
A single guitar pattern opens the track, intimate and slightly melancholy, like someone playing alone at dawn.
Verse 1
The vocal enters gently over the guitar, unhurried and close, with a hint of electronic texture beneath.
Build-up
More guitars join, each adding a new rhythm or harmony, and the sound starts to thicken into the promised wall.
Chorus
The melody opens up over the layered strings, the most emotional and uplifting part of the song, bittersweet and bright at once.
Climax
All the guitar layers ring together in a glowing, resonant swell, the wall at its tallest.
Outro
The layers fall away until the song returns to something close to its opening, a soft and fitting farewell.
Concepts in Focus
Nemur is a verse-chorus form song on an album otherwise made of club tracks. Techno tracks like the album’s opener “Here Comes the Techno” develop by adding and removing layers over a steady beat; Nemur instead alternates sung verses with a melodic chorus, the way a pop or folk song does. Listen for the moment the chorus melody opens up: that change of section, rather than a change of texture, is what moves the song forward.
This page uses the extended mix from A Raver’s Diary: The Extended Versions, the companion release Boxer issued in 2009 for DJs. The techno tracks gain whole minutes in their extended forms, “Klin” growing from under five to over seven, but Nemur only goes from 4:46 to 4:51. A song shaped around a voice and a chorus has little room for the long intros and outros a DJ needs, which is exactly why it stands apart on the album.
Artistic Context
Dusty Kid is the Sardinian producer Paolo Alberto Lodde, best known in the late 2000s for intense, melodic techno. A Raver’s Diary, his debut album, was composed and recorded between July 2007 and September 2008 at his JFL Studio in Sardinia and released on 20 April 2009 by Cologne’s Boxer Recordings, with distribution through Kompakt; he wrote, produced, arranged and mixed it himself. “Nemur (Walls of Guitars)” closes the album, a bold choice after the seventeen-minute “America”. In 2020 the album was reissued digitally on Isolade with the extended versions and a continuous mix of the whole record.
Impact and Reception
Nemur has become the gentle, human side of an artist usually heard at peak time, the track listeners return to after the techno. It is here because it shows how much heart can hide inside a dance producer. Listen to it at sunrise, preferably after a long night.
