NOMON

Shayna and Nava Dunkelman—the sisters who compose the engrossing electronics-and-drums duo NOMON—left Tokyo for the United States in order to study. Both eventually ended up at Mills College before splintering into different scenes. Shayna headed east, collaborating with the likes of Wu Fei, Xiu Xiu, Trevor Dunn, and John Zorn. Nava remained out west, working with William Winant, Fred Frith, and assorted groups in San Francisco. But amid the pandemic, Nava joined her sister in New York and returned to a duo they’d launched several years earlier, NOMON. Raised in Japan by a mother who is a composer and teacher and an American father, both sisters were percussionists and electronics explorers, so they decided to link toolkits and create teeming worlds of sound, where gamelan and kankyō ongaku intersect with modular synthesizers and rock ’n’ roll power. The two clad in blue and red, playing percussive arrays and electronic rigs side-by-side, their shows became must-sees within New York’s experimental scene.

The pair’s riveting debut LP, 2025’s Echoes of Breakage, broadcast that intensity and image beyond the city. The Dunkelmans cover so much ground in the course of 40 minutes. “Amaranth” rides a slinking trip-hop groove, bells breaking over a sea of sculpted static. “The Girl Who Became a Deer” delivers a strange gamelan dance party, the moves scripted to a delightfully complex time signature. And on the 12-minute title track, they move through a deep drone, drums rumbling as if there’s a marching band just beyond the hill, until arriving at a diaphanous midsection, metallophones rising into the air. NOMON eventually locks into a mighty groove, the sisters’ drum kits bound together the same way that some siblings sing perfect harmonies. The existence of NOMON seems like an act of predestination; everything about the sound itself, though, is a surprise.