nnirror :: yondis (Evel)

One does not need context or production acumen to enjoy these tracks, and to feel emotionally attached to them—these piece grab your attention beyond the extend of any techy or compositional trick, and linger once they’re done playing, like fizzy crisp air after a summer shower.

Doubling down on lushness, ethereal pads and sparse plucked synths

 

At a year’s distance from destory, nnirror is back on Evel with a new full-length record: split almost equally between studio material and a live performance, yondis continues Michael Cella’s wholly personal sound moving towards slower, less manic and more spacious compositions without giving up on infectious beats and production advancements. destory’s tracks, in fact, reveled in density and the most complex interplays of melodies, rhythms, and wildly diverse production choices (the rocky landslides underlying the beauty of “holdfast,” to cite one instance), to the point of barely controlled chaos. Its successor knows how to live up to expectations and still mix it up: yondis sees nnirror doubling down on lushness, ethereal pads and sparse plucked synths of a rare emotional resonance, with rhythms that anchor everything in groove without lacking the elements of uniqueness that one has come to expect.

In fact, aided by the much lower tempos, the beats in yondis are probably starker and catchier by comparison: a track like “tulip____s__l_ink,” for exa​mple, with its steady and slow 90-something BPM boom-bap-infused pulse, pairs a head-nodding groove with an epic melodic component where two synths call and respond, climaxing in a wash of light and noise. Likewise, “dumpster glint” pairs its core rhythm with swelling synths, crystal-clear melodies that sound both comfortingly familiar and messengers of the future, and detailed textures ranging from digital glitches to squeaks and rumbles and everything in between—if a trip hop artist with the best technical chops decided to cover Autechre’s “jatevee C,” it might just sound a bit like this.

Discrete compositions are connected ::

The latter part of the album is filled by a live set at Algorithmic Art Assembly v3.0, a hybrid conference and music festival focusing on process-based art held in San Francisco in March 2026. This bears some similarities to nnirror’s previous opening set for Autechre, performed and released in the autumn of 2025, and hearing the evolutions and different roads the live set took in just a few months is exciting. The 30-minute journey can hardly be related in words—the discrete compositions are connected or transformed one into the other but stay memorable in their own right, and culminate in a short vocoded monologue at the end.

Developed with his own tools (some of which you can find on Gumroad as VST and Max for Live devices), the album etymologically links art and technical competence, but the impact of the music is not lost. One does not need context or production acumen to enjoy these tracks, and to feel emotionally attached to them—these piece grab your attention beyond the extend of any techy or compositional trick, and linger once they’re done playing, like fizzy crisp air after a summer shower.

yondis is available on Evel.