Nessie & Her Beard's debut is tellingly titled BOLD/HARD (with both words pronounced simultaneously in duophony). It was produced by Orchestral Colour’s own Brendan Wheatley with OCR’s finest stable of session musicians. Countless hours of sound material were condensed and arranged into eleven unique and catchy songs, the intricate beauty of which reveals itself only through repeated listens. Layers of rhythmic noise and harmonic drones provide a dense backdrop for Nessie’s lyrical melodies, with dynamic punctuation provided by electromechanical toy sounds. The listener can only rarely be certain of what she or he is hearing. Was that an ARP synthesizer, a Flex-a-Tone, or perhaps Nessie’s own golden throat? Only Nessie knows for sure. The only insight into the machinations behind this album come from a music video created for BOLD/HARD's second single "Labella". "...the hypnotic underwater grooves, the nano-smooth arcs of nth order frequency vibrations with the sprawling intertwining webs they combine into, and the tinkling cascades that can only be made by crafting windchimes out of fractured shards of the many illusions around us and hanging them out in the raging ultracosmic dust-storm of infinity as universes form, dissipate, reform, and collide. I highly recommend this album for recreational listening." - Joshua Carpenter (Myspace review)
