Album Announcement: Deviations / Part II
Nick Roder, Indigo
&
‘1000 dolphins’ Video & Single
Released today, 15 May 2025
Biography
Nick Roder is a composer and musician who likes to wear many musical hats. Originally from Melbourne and now living in Copenhagen, Nick works in a number of areas: music for screen, dance and video games, arranging, and making his own solo work. Since 2023 Nick has worked closely alongside Oliver Coates as a composer’s assistant. Nick has assisted Oliver on several projects for screen, including films Foe and Close to You, TV series Mary & George and Omnivore and upcoming films The History of Sound and Pillion both premiering at Cannes 2025. Nick has composed music for several video games including This Dead Winter and Roadwarden, which was featured in ‘2022 game of the year’ lists published by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Telegraph UK and PC Gamer. Nick has worked alongside Melbourne-based contemporary dancer/director Harrison Ritchie-Jones on several projects that explore an intersection between movement, music and film, including CUDDLE and Tantrum For Six which premiered in February 2025 in Melbourne. In 2020 Nick conceptualised Indigo, a project that focuses on the deep sonic and musical exploration of little-heard ensembles. The first album Part I was released by Melbourne label Music Company and features nine pieces for bass guitar and tenor saxophone. Deviations / Part II is due 5 June 2025.
1000 dolphins > Video & Single Release
Today, 15 May 2025, Nick Roder / Indigo releases 1000 dolphins, a flurry of guitars that feels a bit like what swimming with 1000 dolphins might sound like. 1000 dolphins is the solitary single with accompanying animated video before the release of the full album Deviations / Part II on 5 June 2025.
Nick Roder is a composer and musician - originally from Melbourne, Australia now living in London. Nick first released work as Indigo in 2021, releasing Part I with Melbourne-based label Music Company. Nick relocated to Europe in 2022, and since 2023 has focussed on music for screen, working alongside composer and cellist Oliver Coates. Nick is now turning his attention towards a second Indigo release, announcing the second instalment: Deviations / Part II.
1000 dolphins is the piece of music that galvanised the sound of the album Deviations / Part II. Feeling as though 1000 dolphins emerged out of a combination of thin-air and chance-process, it felt vital to use this piece as the nucleus of the album. What defines this tune is a balance of a hyper-organic guitar recording and computer-based digital processing.
The piece began with an hour-long improvised recording session, using only a classical acoustic guitar. Combinations of harmonics and stopped notes were used in an improvised flurry. Nick then sifted through and pulled out the improvised guitar recordings that popped out, amplifying high-end information and adding compression to zoom-in on finger noises and fretboard squeaks. He then used various digital processes to further fragment, glitch, process, sample and re-sample small slices of material. A balance of chance and logic, an attempt at evoking of the feeling of swimming with 1000 dolphins.
The animated video that accompanies 1000 dolphins, made by artist and animator Jon DiNapoli explores both visual representations of the musical process and aesthetic and lets the videos narrative be guided by intuition through the process of making. Parallel techniques present in the aural / musical world of 1000 dolphins are reflected in the visual world; looping, the championing of visual artefacts and the collaging of various animation processes and techniques are combined to create - or uncover - a parallel narrative that runs alongside the aural 1000 dolphins journey.
Credits
All music written, performed, recorded and mixed by Nick Roder, except;
Track 01 > Alto saxophone performed and recorded by Flora Carbo
Track 08 > Vocal FX performed by Sara Flindt
Mastered by Max Dowling
Artwork, design & animation by Jon DiNapoli
Tracklist
01 > Interlude sixteen
02 > 1000 dolphins
03 > Plant food
04 > Solitary | Elemental
05 > Pregnancy
06 > Cloud atlas’d
07 Strange circuit
08 > Wild flame
09 > BTM
10 > Sill
Deviations / Part II Announcement
Deviations / Part II is the second release catalogued under the moniker Indigo by composer and guitarist Nick Roder, releasing 5 June 2025.
Nick Roder is a composer and musician - originally from Melbourne, Australia now living in London. Nick first released work as Indigo in 2021, releasing Part I with Melbourne-based label Music Company. Nick relocated to Europe in 2022, and since 2023 has focussed on music for screen, working alongside composer and cellist Oliver Coates. Nick is now turning his attention back towards an Indigo release, announcing the second instalment: Deviations / Part II.
Written and recorded in Copenhagen throughout 2024, the record is made up of ten musical vignettes centring around the classical guitar and hollow-body electric bass. Whereas on Part I, Nick explored melodic compositions and raw, unprocessed production using the hollow-body acoustic bass guitar, the foundation of Part II is the exploration of textural compositions on acoustic guitars & basses using digital processing.
The initial guitar recordings were often captured over improvised recording sessions and then edited and processed in an attempt to uncover interesting traits within the material. Over time, experimentation using digital fragmentation, reconstruction and re-presentation of the analogue musical material began to define the work. Through sampling, re-sampling, pitch-shifting, speed shifting, et cetera, sounds & melodies “hidden” in the instruments began to reveal themselves. It is these “hidden melodies” that this process and this album aims to uncover and explore.
The record is also a sidestep for Nick in terms of his relationship to harmony and melody. Whereas previously (Indigo Part I), Nick focused heavily on melody, and its relationship to a harmonic context, this album focusses on texture. The goal is to provoke feeling and thought through these textures, allowing augmentation through digital processes to redefine and reshape organic sounds into interesting and evocative musical material.