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WZRDRYAV

Wave Resource

OUT APRIL 25, 2025 on all digital listening platforms

LINE welcomes back Kelly Nairn, aka wzrdryAV, with Wave Resource, his 3rd album for the label. His previous albums West Coast Systems Vol 2 (LINE_127, 2022) and West Coast Systems (LINE_116, 2020) are loved by listeners for their grainy warmth and lushness. The last track is a blended continuous mix version of all of the pieces included on the album.

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In 2013, I bought a cheap Casio HT-700 synthesizer for 50 bucks. It looked more like a generic entry level synth, but to my surprise, it also had analog filters and a decent degree of programmability. With a sole two-digit “screen,” it was quite tedious to program. In the end though, and with the assistance of some outboard effects, I was able to design a variety of sounds to work from and build a substantial library of inspiration that I still use to this day.

After many laborious, experimental sessions, I got to a place where I thought that I’d squeezed everything out of it that I could, and left the machine to rest on a studio shelf. Roughly a decade later, I felt compelled to try recording with the Casio again. I ran the HT-700 through a Phase 90 and began to hear sounds that were really catching my attention. After editing the results, I discovered a three second blip of sound that clearly stood above the rest. I put the file into some processing software dating back to the OS9 era and heard elements I’d been chasing for years. These were the sounds that I had imagined in my mind for a very long time, but couldn’t quite realize. 

Wave Resource represents the closest that I’ve ever gotten to hearing my internal world play out of a speaker. The vast majority of the album is that three second sample described above, pushed into as many different directions as I could with the available tools. 

As an artist, I’ve been drawn to the idea of humans making “something out of nothing” forever… Themes of survival, resourcefulness, and efficiency are always on my mind. Initially and deeply inspired as a kid in Grade 7 by a hip-hop, cut and paste/sample-based aesthetic, I took notice when I heard artists that were doing so much with relatively basic setups compared to what we have in 2025. Seeing their chosen tools being repurposed beyond their planned utility in clever, previously unimaginable ways, blew my mind.  Growing up in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, I watched both sonic and visual creative movements emerge that would have never happened without true ingenuity. 

When resources are limited, I believe it to be an opportunity to activate the epicenter of authenticity within and ideally create something that holds up years later.

Bandcamp Apple Music TIDAL Reviews
Catalog:
LINE_161
Format:
digital
Edition:
open edition
Release:
April 2025
Tracklist:

Resource 1.0 (05:49)
Resource 2.0 (04:38)
Resource 3.0 (02:48)
Resource 4.0 (05:43)
Resource 5.0 (02:55)
Resource 6.0 (05:48)
Resource 7.0 (04:16)
Resource 8.0 (04:33)
Resource Blend (34:08)

Produced & Mixed By Kelly Claude Nairn
Mastered by Greg Mindorff at Suite Sound Labs, Vancouver BC
Cover art: Kelly Claude Nairn

As a child of the 1980s, Vancouver-born producer Kelly Claude Nairn (wzrdryAV) was hypnotized by the results of New York City resourcefulness in the form of early hip-hop culture, and later, the eclectic sample-based rap of the 1990s. Raised by a new age mom and jazz freak artist dad, inspiration from the family’s record cabinet was a natural progression. Two turntables, a mixer, and a sampler later, Nairn was soon concocting left-field instrumentals of his own. Concurrent with electro-acoustic studies under granular synthesis pioneer Barry Truax at Simon Fraser University, field recordings, audio collage, sound object manipulation, and ambient works were added to his cache. With his foundation in place and his technique evolving, a “sample anything” credo helped to take the beat maker into a new dimension at dawn of the new millennium. From big screen cinema and late night VHS sessions to TV sign off music and nature sounds, nothing was off limits. This not only led to the creation of WZRDRY (Kelly’s imprint and artistic umbrella), but a range of vinyl, cassette tape, and compact disc releases issued by international labels such as LINE, Silent Season, Digitalis Industries, Accidental Meetings, The Jewel Garden, Panospria (Quiet City), and ICS Library Records (Seekersinternational).

wzrdryrecordings.bandcamp.com

bio: Kevin Howes (Voluntary In Nature)

REVIEWS OF
Wave Resource

  • Kelly Nairn’s third voyage for LINE under the moniker wzrdryAV, “Wave Resource”, feels like watching a single droplet traced through an entire storm system – every sizzle, swell and whisper unfolding from a tiny three-second fragment rescued from an abandoned Casio HT-700. Back in 2013, Nairn snagged that entry-level keyboard for pocket change, coaxing its hidden analog filters through clumsy two-digit menus and rack effects. After shelving the HT-700 for years, a chance run through an old Phase 90 pedal unearthed “the sound I’d been chasing”, he says. The result is nine spellbinding “Resource” variations – each a curious universe built from that single blip, plus a final 34-minute “Blend” that knits them all into one continuous dream-sequence.

    From the warm, crunchy hiss of “Resource 1.0” through the subtly mutated rhythms of “Resource 4.0” and the spectral drones of “Resource 6.0”, you sense both a scientist’s rigor and a beat-maker’s delight in mischief. Nairn’s pedigree – hip-hop scratching in Vancouver basements, granular synthesis under Barry Truax at Simon Fraser, tape-loop experiments and field recordings – comes vividly to life in these pieces. He’s always been drawn to “making something out of nothing”: here, nearly every sound springs from the same microscopic kernel, stretched, fractured, reversed and glimmering with possibility.

    There’s a sly humor in how each track feels both familiar and alien: a melody buried so deep it sounds like memory, a percussive click that might be a sampled footstep or an errant wineglass. “Resource 3.0” is like eavesdropping on a robot’s lullaby; “Resource 7.0” jolts awake with jittery percussion before dissolving into ghostly electronics. The cumulative effect isn’t just ambient texture – it’s a meditation on scarcity and ingenuity, a reminder that technological constraints can be the mother of invention.

    Nairn’s musical journey, from turntables through IDM and experimental tape culture, underpins every corner of “Wave Resource”. You can almost hear his teenage self, wide-eyed listening to early hip-hop’s collage of samples, and his later academic curiosity, mapping how sound objects interact. Yet despite the conceptual weight, this album never feels arid: it pulses with life. The final “Resource Blend” is less a remix than a requiem-cum-renaissance, flowing through all eight palettes until they dissolve into a single, wondrous wash of grain and glow.

    In a landscape crowded with maximalist production, wzrdryAV’s “Wave Resource” is a testament to minimalism’s power. It’s a record that asks you to lean in, to catch the hum of analog circuitry and the echo of Nairn’s own curiosity. Ten years after he first cracked open that Casio’s secrets, he’s finally given us the soundtrack to that moment of rediscovery—and it sounds like magic made manifest from a single, precious atom of sound.
    —chaindlk.com