Words by Anton Spice

Jason Chung hasn’t slept well. It’s 10am in LA when we speak, but he’s been awake for a while already, worried about snoozing the alarm and missing the call. It’s been five years since his last album as Nosaj Thing and this is his first interview in quite some time too. 

“It was such an intense experience,” he says, as he begins to reflect on Continua, an album that has taken two-and-a-half years to complete. “I tried my best to not think about it for a while, and now's the time to get back into it, and it's great.” I can’t help but feel that a sense of anticipation has contributed to his restless night.

Continua may be the LA-based producer’s fifth LP, but really it is an album of firsts. His first for UK label LuckyMe, his first to extensively sample live instrumentation, and perhaps most importantly, his first to feature such a wide and ambitious collection of vocalists and contributors. Some like Julianna Barwick, Toro Y Moi and Kazu Makino he’d worked with before, and others, like serpentwithfeet, Panda Bear, Pink Siifu, and Coby Sey were more like cold calls. “It's a huge growing record for me,” Chung says. Doing things for the first time often means taking risks and doing things differently.

Chung traces the origins of the album to an enforced reset at the start of the pandemic. “I was feeling kind of burnt out prior to that,” he recalls. “I don’t usually take holidays or vacations, so it was something that I didn’t know that I needed.” Released from the responsibilities of live performance, he began to re-evaluate his direction of travel. “I valued and was precious with that time. Primarily touring for the last ten years, I was really starting to feel like, where am I going to go?”

Initially, inspiration came from within. As a young beat-maker obsessed with The Neptunes, Chung had wanted to produce songs, but instead found himself “going left”, gravitating towards the world of noise, punk and loop-pedals at LA’s DIY venue The Smell. Released in 2009, his debut album, Drift was a futuristic and experimental instrumental hip-hop record that caught the wave of the West Coast beats scene. Alongside Flying Lotus, Daedelus and others, he held court at Low End Theory, working his software hard to effortlessly fray the edges of rhythm and time.

Emerging from such a tight-knit community, and picking up credits with Chance The Rapper, Kid Cudi and Kendrick Lamar along the way, you’d be forgiven for thinking that collaboration came naturally for Chung. Instead, he describes his journey, a little hesitantly, as one of a “straight-up bedroom producer”, comfortable working alone and habitually self-effacing. For Continua to feature twelve guests across its eleven tracks gives you some sense of the scale of this shift.

“Growing up listening to radio in LA, what you're exposed to is mostly music with vocals,” he explains, as the impulse to make a different kind of record came to the fore. “I had this idea of wanting to tap back into just making songs this time around.” Hooking up with LuckyMe helped Chung take those first steps and encouraged him to draw up a wish list of artists he’d like to work with. “I'm kind of shy about contacting artists I want to collaborate with, so I tried to build enough courage to make contact,” he says, admitting that it sometimes took up to a month to send one email. “Once I started getting some responses, it really inspired and motivated me to just keep going.” It is a testament to the high regard in which he is held that everyone on the list made it onto the record.

To work with so many vocalists and create an album that feels like a coherent whole, Chung returned to his teenage love for the Bristol sound of Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky. “I really loved that space. I always felt like those bands were just really futuristic,” he enthuses. “I didn’t want to be nostalgic, that was very important for me. My question was, what would my version sound like?”

The answer came courtesy of both intention and circumstance. Continua is not only Chung’s first album to feature live instrumentation by friends Amir Yaghmai and Mike Andrews throughout, but also the first to employ stem mastering, where instruments are grouped and adjusted as individual elements in the mix. Working with engineer Mike Bell, he carved the depth needed to make space for lyrics and complemented it with the use of a single spring reverb - a nod to UK band Broadcast - in order to drape the whole album in a sumptuous, gossamer haze. And then there was the circumstance.

“Right before the pandemic, I damaged one of my ears DJing. It was a very scary situation because I had really bad tinnitus for about six months straight. I didn’t really know if my hearing was going to be the same anymore.” Exacerbated by stress, the tinnitus had a tangible impact on the kind of sound Chung felt comfortable working with. “I was just so sensitive to those harsh frequencies, where you usually hear snares and hi-hats and things like that.” Once things started improving, he began rolling off those higher frequencies, essentially rounding out the sound field and giving the record a fullness and weight absent from the sharper end of earlier Nosaj Thing productions.

Describing the record as a collage, it is Chung’s vivid sense of atmosphere - of the music inhabiting a world of its own - that glues Continua together. “In the past, working on and collaborating with vocalists, it was more of a 'hey I’ve arranged this instrumental' and I would get vocals back,” Chung says. This time, once contact had been made, he would send each vocalist a pack of five sonic sketches and a copy of a black and white photograph by Eddie Otchere, the famed hip-hop photographer who has recently turned his lens away from Wu-Tang Clan and Jay-Z and towards the rolling hills of the British countryside.

The image, which features on the album’s cover, captures the half-light of the Scottish Highlands and one of those endless country roads flanked by sodden pines, a peak shrouded in the mist up ahead. “It just made me feel like it was pointing to somewhere unknown, maybe just driving off without a plan,” Chung explains. “There was some darkness in that photo, but you know that saying, with a light at the end of the tunnel.” The album title, which translates as ‘keep going’, points in a similar direction.

Fear, dread, beauty and hope. Whether in Duval Timothy’s piano melody on the title track, or ‘Blue Hour’ with Julianna Barwick, which recalls the spirit of Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrops’, these expansive nocturnes betray a reverence for the quieter moments, music for shades of reflection and transformation. Once complete, Chung would road test final versions of each track in the car while driving along LA’s dreamlike highways. Listen to Continua and it’s not hard to be there with him, watching the lights of the city splay against the windows as you pass.

“I just really visualised this record more like a movie,” Chung elaborates. Cinema has been an ongoing inspiration and for as long as he can remember he has worked beside a second monitor playing films on mute. “It comes back to being a bedroom producer,” he explains. “Your bed is in there, your TV is in there, everything is in there.” For rap beats and club tunes, he turns to MTV’s era-specific music video montages. On Continua it was a looped version of Koyaanisqatsi – the non-narrative documentary by Godfrey Reggio that collages images of nature and society - that provided the backdrop. For an artist who is yet to compose a soundtrack, Nosaj Thing has been quietly re-scoring films his whole life.

Of course, it’s one thing having an image or a mood in mind and another to convey it to so many different musicians, some in person, some remotely. “I would say the biggest thing that I learned, which is important for anyone collaborating, is communication,” he says. “Coming from someone who can be pretty anxious about these things, I tried my best to get on the phone to really just explain the world that I was trying to create for this record.”

In that sense, the example set by Eddie Otchere was more than just visual. In an interview in 2018, the photographer spoke of his trepidation in taking on work so different to that which he had become known for. Swapping Biggie Smalls for the South Downs was Otchere’s way of “going off piste” and “telling new stories”, and something of that approach – of confounding expectations and taking yourself out of your comfort zone – appealed to Chung too. “Just being a fan myself, I like it when I see either musicians or artists take that turn. I think it's really interesting. I like seeing someone challenge themselves.”

Did he find it difficult to do so himself? “Oh my gosh, yeah, it was so hard,” he laughs. “I guess that's the hardest thing. Sometimes to grow is to do things that make you feel uncomfortable.” To know what you want is one thing, to run the risk of trying to get it something else entirely, and to hear Chung speak now is to hear an artist liberated by achieving something he never thought was possible. “Man, it was just straight up so fun and enjoyable. I just really like learning from working with other artists. Every single time something unexpected happens, when whoever you're working with just lays down a new idea, you know?”

Perhaps then, Continua is not just about keeping on but also looking back to look forwards. It is Jason Chung coming full circle, and you can hear that confidence flow from what is a genuinely original and moving body of work. “I would say this record is a blueprint of what's to come,” he concludes. “It's about everything that I want to do or dream of doing, and just bringing that into my world.” The road is opening up ahead of Nosaj Thing once more. No wonder he can’t sleep.

Nosaj Thing’s Continua is out October 28th on LuckyMe