Nonplace Urban Field

NUF is the experimental solo alter ego of Drome collaborator Berndt Friedmann, whose collaborative works under that name have been influential reference points on the map of post-rave ambient dub and trip-hop. Where Drome's more organic approach to sampledelic breakbeat ambient and digital dub has placed the group next to artists such as Coldcut and Deep Space Network, however, NUF is closer to the outskirts of genre hybridity occupied by the Orb, Transcend, James Bong, and Uwe Schmidt, bringing house, techno, ambient, dub, jazz, and genres unnamed into close proximity. Although NUF's first full-length work leaned more toward wholesale genre integration, subsequent releases (particularly the "mini-album" Raum Fur Notizen) tended increasingly toward abstraction, constructing complicated, often humorous amalgams of dub, jungle, electro, jazz, and Latin. Based in Köln, Friedmann's NUF material has also been released on the industrial techno label Toxxikk Trakks and on Incoming!'s digidub compilation series, Serenity Dub. In 2000, Friedmann released Burnt Friedmann Con Ritmo through Stefan Betke's Scape label. [See Also: Drome] ~ Sean Cooper