dragongirl (Nikoline Ursin [Erichsen]) hasn’t been here since 2022 when she got one of her tracks in the ‘Songs of the Year’ round up.
Since then she released her debut album in 2023, followed by a remix album in 2024 and now she returns with the first single from a new EP that drops on May 2nd.
While she’s been out of sight and out of mind she’s been experimenting with film theme compositions, something I reckon she was doing with the first track of hers we featured, ‘Isolde’s greatest challenge’, which itself challenged both the club dancing crowd and the focused listener to find common ground, and did succeed in doing that at her end.
Always minimalistic but a generator of energy to match any fossil fuel burning power station she’s come back round now to a full-on, indisputable club track with ‘Chopping Mall’.
I have to admit it was the imaginative title that drew me in. If you’ve seen the Star Trek spoof film Galaxy Quest (if you haven’t you must) you’ll recall the scene where Sigourney Weaver and Tim Allen are directed through The Chompers, giant pieces of fast moving machinery that would squash you like a fly in a nanosecond if you got caught up in them and which existed only because a badly written piece of script for the episode wasn’t discarded.
So I couldn’t get the idea of a chopping mall out of my mind, one in which if you failed to spend $100 dollars in 20 minutes you got dismembered at the checkout.
In fact you can even hear these particular choppers working away at a frenetic pace in the opening 25 seconds before it goes all spacey and then it alternates between the two until the end but with the foot never coming off the pedal.
It’s got a lot of the 90s about it, Ibiza, Manumission and the rest, it’s catchy as hell but at the same time it could slot into any new club trend easily.
Can’t say fairer than that.
What I didn’t know about dragongirl until I read the latest press release is that she is also a feminist and queer role model in a world historically dominated by heterosexual white men. And she’s more than happy to talk about her position widely.
She’s at the forefront of a new generation of club composers who also does works on theatre productions and she has a message that transcends the club scene,
And all this sets her a challenge. Will she be able to continue to break into that established platform without making artistic compromises? We’ll soon know.
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/xdragongirl
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xdragongirl/
Bandcamp: https://dragong1rl.bandcamp.com/
Photo: RAT TV
