Nana Zorin - Do U Want To Live Forever?
By Alex Sells
‘Do U Want To Live Forever?’, ask Czech electro-dub group Nana Zorin, on their 2004 album of the same name. The dearth of information available about this group implies that, at some point in the smoky haze of trying to solve this fundamental question through musical experimentation, the answer was a resounding “no”. Having quickly developed something of an obsession with the band after the first listen, this mystery has driven me to try to work out what exactly Nana Zorin were trying to tell us when they recorded this incredible work, and then vanished in an untraceable puff of smoke sometime around 2008.
The CD of Do U Want To Live Forever? made its way out of cultural stasis and into my hands this summer during a visit to an unassuming village on the Czech-Austrian border. A delegation from my sports club were on a training camp at our coach’s labour of love: a dilapidated 1940’s school house that he was converting into a bespoke sports centre. At this particular time the grand vision was nascent and our facilities were, charmingly, extremely basic. Evenings were spent rediscovering entertainment through analog means, however after the nth game of solitaire I descended on the tower of CDs that left a thick footprint in the isotropic layer of plaster dust.
After alternating Bob Dylan and Czech Folk albums, I earned solitude from my peers. However, Nana Zorin’s cover art beamed out temptingly, with a design that on first glance looks like the powerpoint title slide of a year 6 presentation, but leaves a lingering hint of the strangeness within. I was struck helpless and before I knew it had devoured Do U Want To Live Forever? start to finish three times in a row – picture the first time an indie kid hears Tame Impala’s Lonerism in secondary school – and still I wasn’t satisfied. Since that moment, I have become something of an insufferable advocate for their music.
The album sets the tone for 40+ minutes of psychic inner-gaze with the opening number ‘nineelevenoone’ . The singer, with an unplaceable regional twang, puts on his best linen shirt and birkenstocks, announcing “this song goes out to victims of war and violence everywhere”. A catchy dub riff follows, slowly building behind the rhythmic lyrics insisting on a reaction of peace and love to the horrors of the 9/11 attacks. It breaks out into an awesome acoustic breakdown before rushing to a close in a climactic cacophony. The song encapsulates the range of ability in this group, as every aspect from melody to tone blends to create the mystifying and sage atmosphere that characterizes this album.
Another stand out for me is track 3: ‘Desire Bout’. Complementing a spacey synthesizer backing, resembling a Screamadelica ballad or The Orb, a seductive female vocalist straight out of a European trance banger warns about a future living undesirably in ‘a leaky hydroponic forest’ (as far as I can tell) before suggesting that ‘we could make a baby’; make love not leaky hydroponic forests? Whether peeled from the study of philosophical text, or breathed out in a cloud of marijuana smoke, it is this blend of futuristic visions and urgent moral messages that help make Nana Zorin’s work so appealing.
Also not to be missed is a psychedelic monologue in track 5, imagining a conversation between John Lennon and Mohammed Ali, the central thesis being that ‘the more REAL you get, the more it gets UNREAL’. Then songs 6 and 8 really show off their instrumental genius. I have trouble deciding where this band sits in the canon of early 2000s music with its blend of flowered up dub and synthesized electronic bursts, but at the end of the day they are masters of both.
I spent many long nights trying to discover who Nana Zorin were and what inspired them to make this masterpiece. A few tantalizing hints echo around the information sphere – a reference on some archived Czech music forum, a long forgotten interview, even a singer from an earlier album I tracked down on facebook who declined to respond to my unsolicited questioning – but not enough fragments to form even the outline of a picture. Even their name, which I heard from someone might be Slovakian, is a complete enigma. And so my last act as maybe Nana Zorin’s last superfan on Earth is to pass on their gospel. Their music can’t be bought or streamed online, so email me at douwanttoliveforever@gmail.com to share my copy of the album. Can I be sued for this? Who knows, but I think that seeing Nana Zorin reunited once more across the Prague courtroom as they rinse me for every pathetic penny I’m worth might just be the best moment of my life.