Chong the Nomad Beguiles and Grooves on Her Long-Awaited Debut LP

Of the many performers captured in Gary Campbell’s NEWCOMER documentary, Alda Agustiano is a singular presence. Her development as an artist, both literally and thematically, frames the film. At first she’s in her nascency, playing one of her very first sets against a brick wall at the Belltown Yacht Club. You wouldn’t know it, but there are about five people in her crowd; as the clip ends, one of them gets up to leave. By the very end of the film, Agustiano is laying down her strange, engrossing electronic dance beats on the stage of the CID Block Party, and those five people have turned into five hundred. She finishes her song to a roar of approval, a stirring cap to Campbell’s quiet treatise on the dignity backgrounding underground musicianship.

Among its many insights, the film proves that the music Agustiano makes as Chong the Nomad was pretty much fleshed out from the get-go. That’s the power of a strong vision. Chong the Nomad songs tend to play like alien transmissions, amalgamations of instrumental hip-hop, EDM, glitch, and vocal pop that don’t sound quite like anything else. Individually they reside on a spectrum of accessibility; her most pop-forward moments, like 2019’s “Nothing Else” or 2020’s “Take Two,” or really anything off A Long Walk EP, recall the vibrancy of the late-2000’s “indietronica” era, a period that rewarded meticulous injections of weirdness into a largely accessible mesh of electronic sound and time-tested pop songwriting.

Given what she’s demonstrated over the years, one might have expected her to ply her long-awaited debut LP with reminders of her ability to conjure off-kilter electro-pop whimsy. What we get instead on Do We Make of It? is a fleet of dense, beautifully inscrutable tracks that manifest their own climate, and it makes the record a far, far more interesting prospect.

With virtually no advance press, there’s an almost sinister lack of context for its bizarre landscape, and a related pleasure in piecing it together yourself. “Find Me Here” opens the record with the sonic equivalent of a fog machine before layering together synth arpeggios, polyrhythmic percussive samples, wordless vocal harmonies, and a throbbing disco beat like a homemade lasagna. Initially it’s familiar territory for Chong the Nomad, until the track breaks down into a slower tempo and stuttering fragments of noise as if the cords connecting the instruments to the DAW were busted.

That lapse into sudden discordance sets the tone for the rest of the record, which altogether feels determined to reintroduce Chong the Nomad as a project devoted primarily to adventure. In a move reminiscent of Kid A, we don’t get a real lyric until “4 Mistakes,” and it quickly evaporates amid the song’s glittery oscillations and infectious chrome-like beats. The song’s bedrock, a guitar sample provided by L.A. producer Taylor Dexter, was apparently part of a collaboration between Agustiano and a high-profile artist who subsequently ghosted her on the idea. Agustiano took the opportunity to spite that decision with a song positively bursting with elements, from crystalline triplets to a thrum of bongo hits to a gentle whistle wedged into the remaining spaces.

So many ideas are crammed into Do We Make of It?’s half-an-hour runtime that just one listen will not cut it. You should spend that initial listen just luxuriating in where Agustiano’s brain goes. Songs like “Redo” and “Ocho Pocho” play like four or five different song segments sewn together quilt-like, changing shapes and outfits at will. The three-song stretch between “Solace” and “Sakit” is particularly enthralling; the latter takes no time at all to turn its dirty, mesmerizing beat into one of the finest songs on the album.

As usual, Agustiano delivers her vocals with eccentric contours, as if whole chunks were excised from them, and obscures them in effects until they’re just part of the ever-evolving din. That treatment is even more extreme on Do We Make of It?; where her vocals do surface, they’re often mixed so low that they’re more likely to bypass the eardrums and latch onto the subconscious. That happens on “Eloquent,” perhaps the loveliest cut on the record in how it glides on an affected vocal sample and a palpable sense of melancholy. “I hate the pretty voice with no soul/Nice eyes with the promo” she raps at an almost imperceptible level, a literal sneak diss — likely not at any particular person, but at a paradigm that favors style over substance. (The driving blow: “Eloquent on the lenses/But not to the masses”).

Ironically, a lot of what Agustiano is saying within those buried vocals finds her directly imploring us to listen even closer. On “Lend Me Your Ears” she repeats its title as if still unconvinced we haven’t already decided on it, given that it’s the penultimate track. “Solace” sees her juggling an immediate, shuffling rhythm with a mantric nudge toward staying with her — “Would you mind if/the rhythm takes a minute,” she coos, asking for a patience she’s more than earned.

Meanwhile, on “Before It Checks Out,” the album’s mellow closer, she appears to take stock of her career since that 2018 BYC show over a comparatively simple bed of aquatics. The vibe is “acceptance,” something that every aspiring musician battling every set of odds out there is familiar with. “Who would have thought we’d make it this far,” she begins before adding, with intriguing diction, “Why does it feel like nothing yet?”

Agustiano has accomplished a lot since that 2018 BYC show, far more than so many of her peers can claim. She’s collaborated with tons of local and national artists; she’s graced festivals across the country; she’s written a song for Singapore Airlines using just their Airbus A350 as an instrument. But the current musical climate remains a corrosive environment for all but the most entrepreneurial musicians, those who are willing to not only sacrifice their artistry for commerciality but to promote themselves ceaselessly in the process. The attention economy moves so fast, and so relentlessly, that drowning in the rapids seems predestined. (“Play it however you want/It’s pointless to win the game,” she sings on “Before It Checks Out” in a plaintive evocation of PNW humility, “and it could have been lost.”)

Perhaps that’s the reason behind the specific question she raises in the album’s title. not what we think about it, but if we’re paying attention at all. If you are paying attention, you’ll be rewarded with one the greatest local records of the year.