Review
Genre and Mood
Nôze and Wareika meet on “Exodus”, an electronic house track that the one review to mention it called bluesy. The feelings named here, soulful and groovy, follow that word and the dance-floor roots of both acts, because no source describes the song in more detail.
Song Summary
“Exodus” is the fourth of nine tracks on Dring, the album Nôze released on Get Physical Music in April 2011, and it runs just over four minutes. Before the album, a radio edit came out on 7 March 2011 on the single Dring Dring / Exodus. The guests are Wareika, whom Resident Advisor counted, like dOP on the same album, among Nôze’s fellow live ensembles. The French blog Des oreilles dans Babylone gave it one sentence: the bluesy “Exodus”, with the Hamburg group Wareika, is also fairly successful.
Musical Breakdown
That sentence is all the description we found, so the parts below are listening prompts rather than a map of the track.
Main Section
Listen for what made the critic hear blues: a bent note, a slow and heavy swing, a melody that sounds like a lament over a house pulse.
The Guests
Wareika’s Florian Schirmacher is credited with both Nôze members as composer and producer. No source says who sings or plays what, so listen for where a second band’s hand shows.
Outro
Listen for how the track hands over to the next one on Dring, “In the Back of My Ship”, made with dOP.
Concepts in Focus
Wareika are the <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist, and like dOP on Nôze, dOP – In the Back of My Ship they are a whole group rather than a singer adding a hook. Here the credits go further: Schirmacher is a co-writer, so the feature is a shared composition.
The <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/blues/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“blues” title=“The African-American music born in the Deep South around the start of the 20th century, built on call and response, bent “blue” notes and short repeating forms such as the twelve-bar blues. Almost every later popular style, from rock and soul to house, carries some of its scales and phrasing.“>blues is the African-American music of the Deep South, built on bent “blue” notes, call and response and a twelve-bar form. A house track called bluesy need not follow that form; the critic gave no detail, so the word may point to a mood and an inflection rather than a structure.
The radio edit of “Exodus” is listed at about the same length as the album version, a few seconds shorter. No source says what was changed, which makes it a good comparison exercise.
Artistic Context
Nôze are the Parisian duo Ezechiel Pailhès and Nicolas Sfintescu. Fact reported that Dring was more instrumental and improvised, with a stronger jazz influence; Groove heard a real band with guitar, clarinet, saxophone, trombone and drums. Wareika formed in Hamburg in 2007, Jakob Seidensticker, Florian Schirmacher and Henrik Raabe, and, as Circus Company, one of their labels, describes them, play live without computers, improvising around their own material.
Impact and Reception
Reviews of Dring were mixed: Groove heard too much folkloric mixing, while Des oreilles dans Babylone found the album a good vintage and this track one of its successes. Nôze promoted the album with a short teaser of “Exodus”, filmed and edited by Olivier Jourdain. Listen, and add your own sentence to the critic’s.
