This album was released on Cruel Nature Records:
cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/violet-fields

Reviews:

PLASTIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW & REVIEW:
plasticmag.co.uk/2024/02/interview-nnja-riot-drops-new-record/

"“There is a shamanic quality to my music”"
NNJA RIOT INTERVIEW WITH SUN 13:
sun-13.com/2024/02/15/nnja-riot-interview-there-is-a-shamanic-quality-to-my-music/

"Nnja Riot builds songs around her voice, in another dimension this could be a singer songwriter with an acoustic guitar singing gently to a crowded room. Instead it’s a singer songwriter surrounded by synths, samples, beats and static singing in a haze of technology and cables. It’s just brilliant."
- Adrian Bloxham, Fighting Boredom
www.fighting-boredom.co.uk/album-review/schubmodul-hr-giger-counter-curve-nnja-riot-album-reviews/

"seven pieces of electronic avant-pop equally ethereal and pulsing"
- Noel Gardner, New Weird Britain, The Quietus
thequietus.com/articles/34058-dali-de-saint-paul-maxwell-sterling-ruth-goller

"Nnja Riot is indeed an appropriate moniker: the noise grows and takes over by stealth, as if from nowhere: one minute things are pretty mellow, the next, it’s all going off and you’re being carried away on a sonic tidal wave"
- Christopher Nosnibor, Aural Aggravation
auralaggravation.com/2024/02/25/nnja-riot-violet-fields/

“has succeeded in a really remarkable album that deserves attention in various areas of electronic music.”
- A.Kaudaht, African Paper
africanpaper.com/2024/04/20/nnja-riot-violet-fields/
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Violet Fields is the new studio album from Nnja Riot, the solo project of Lisa McKendrick who is based in London.

Using her skills as a songwriter and her love for noise she has crafted seven new tracks which hint at the shamanistic disharmony inherent in human evolution, the futility of war and the disconcerting horror of current global events. She explores these themes amongst disparate and poetic lyrics where she conveys her own feelings of being a human struggling to make sense of a fast changing world intent on its own destruction. As if a scholar of sound she records her memoirs through beats, field recordings, noises, rhythms of the city and nature. As if viewing the contemporary world through the eyes of an alien she observes and dismantles, then rebuilds through the fullness of sound, creating a story that can only be told within the realm of music.

Having immigrated from the remote shores of New Zealand her music often conveys a sense of distance and journey as do her personal experiences of existing between two worlds at opposite ends of the earth. As a multidisciplinary artist her work as a painter is often evident in the colour, abstraction and texture of the music.

Sometimes the beats whirl and confuse like a tumultuous tornado turning in on themselves and at other times they are clear and defined pulsating with intent and clarity. Like huge storm clouds the sound is thick with fog as if driven by the forces of nature only to transform into a clear sky waiting for the next verse. Sometimes they seem to summon the gods with hypnotic force and other times they are lost in the mayhem.

At its nucleus lies a shamanistic yearning—an aspiration to forge an alternative trajectory, and to smash at the doors, make an uproar of noise, to shout, sing, speak in tongues or whisper and use
whatever instruments are needed as weapons to battle on the wasteland of the Violet Fields.

She recorded this album using the infamous Octatrack as a base instrument to create song compositions and then she made overdubs with various instruments like the guitar for a fuzzy distorted noise, synths for some of the melodies, vocals and sometimes vocoders, and the violin which she uses to make whale-like noises and abstractions. Also included in the mix are the Chernobylizer and Fort Processor which are both psycho-geographic synths which she has co-designed.

Nnja Riot has performed both in the UK and internationally more recently at Chaos Theory, Plastic Infinite Presents, Noisemas III, Earworm Presents, NNNNN, IKLECTIKA, Corpora Aliena,
Resonance FM, Piksel Festival Norway, Exit Points Canada and many others. Her other music projects include Isn’tses and previously Listen Lisse.
credits
released February 23, 2024

All music and production by Lisa McKendrick ©2024