Los Angeles-based dark-pop artist DEROSNEC, aka Nina Helene Hirten, introduces the music video for “Nighttime in the Desert,” lifted from her recently released EP, 3 Lives.
A filmmaker, illustrator, singer, performer, and songwriter, DEROSNEC merges her passion for storytelling into a moody, personal, and intense sound, a sound incorporating elements of dark pop, industrial, and trip-pop.
The daughter of an opera singer and a composer, DEROSNEC grew up immersed in music. While attending concerts as a child, she would translate the music into images by drawing pictures. Trained as an opera singer, she taught herself to play guitar, bass, drums, and the piano. In her sophomore year of high school, she released her first self-produced album. Known as the school’s “resident musician,” she later began working with video, which led her to music-based cinema.
When she left home to study film production at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, two of her short films had been shown at festivals in California and she had released two demo albums.
After graduating from Ryerson, she relocated to Vancouver, where she started her production company, Oh Just Peachy Studio Productions. She works with Model M and has performed with Everson Poe, I Am Mandrake, and Squanky Kong.
“Nighttime in the Desert” opens on dark pop colors fused with bluesy savors of R&B. Full of sonic shadows riding a jazz-tinted rhythm, heavy layers of music pulsate with portentous vibrations. A luminous guitar delivers oozing, sleazy accents, dripping with foreboding tones.
DEROSNEC’s voice, at once alluring, sumptuous, and risky, imbues the lyrics with sensuous and simultaneous ominous textures, as if warning against the intoxication of “nighttime in the desert.”
“Nighttime in the desert / A chill rolls up my spine / Sky lights in the black above / It surely is a sign / Come with me through a sea of sand / And border the divine.”
Spacious and dark as the desert sky at night yet seductively prophetic, DEROSNEC’s “Nighttime in the Desert” is magically irresistible.