N/um

The three members of N/UM come from a variety of musical backgrounds. Jeremy Loucas is a five time Grammy winning mixing & mastering engineer with years spent as a DJ in the underground party scene in NY – Elias Meister, an electronically experimental guitarist with a decade of performance experience in free and improvised music – Emil Bovbjerg is a vocalist, synth instrumentalist and producer/DJ with a background in orchestration and contemporary arranging and composition. Each performance or recording by N/UM is improvised, with no pre-composed songs, no plan or structure agreed upon. Despite the daring premise and unconventional creative approach the raison d’etre and mission statement of N/UM is simple: The opposite of war is a dance floor.

N/um translates to medicine or supernatural potent energy. The word is used by the !Kung (formerly Bushmen), an indigenous people of Botswana and Namibia, to describe a healing energy used to cure sickness, both mental and physical, in individuals as well as the community as a whole. N/um is a central part of weekly dancing ceremonies, lasting typically from nightfall into dawn, in which the tribe’s members gather to dance for many hours until dancers enter into varying states of trance. As the trance deepens the n/um builds in the stomach, travels up through the spine and eventually explodes in the brain as the healers reach !Kia, the state in which, according to the tribe’s beliefs, a healer can transfer n/um to those in need of healing as well as to the community where it is said to maintain unity and relieve jealousy, greed and lack of gift giving. Among the !Kung everyone is encouraged to take part in the rituals and over half of the tribe’s members have become healers by the time they reach adulthood.

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