Nicomo

Bio

Nicomo is rock music for people who can’t take it anymore, who want to relax into something beautiful and listen to someone else train-wreck and resurrect for once. It’s warm, spacious alt-folk that gets its foot lodged in a pothole and has a math-rock tantrum just before bedtime. Nicomo is Nico Osborne’s songwriting project with longtime collaborators Gerard Marcus and Duncan Standish. Antiquated Future Records called their first EP Views “An early-morning hangout album meets complex after-dark mood music.”

As a kid, Nico liked to hang out in his dad’s record store in Newburyport, MA, thumbing through Tony Williams and Derek Bailey CDs, timing it around 2pm to try and keep the change off a coffee run. And he played in the marching band. Studying musicology at Oberlin and especially focusing on renaissance polyphony and the early Baroque, he became enchanted by music that ties itself in knots. After that he Philly and singing in a group that learned and performed a couple Bach cantatas a month with a gut-stringed chamber orchestra, while quietly arranging and playing funky music with his former 10-piece band Smalltalker. Now he lives in New York as a sound artist and musician, frequently collaborating with Lea Thomas, Katy Pinke, Jackie West, Oropendola, Devon Church, Pompey, Thanya Iyer, and many more.

To make rent in Brooklyn, he works primarily as an on-location sound engineer – recording dialogue for indie films and mixing live performances for the likes of Steve Roach, Nick Hakim, Allegra Krieger, Melanie Charles, Samora Pinderhughes, Okay Kaya, and countless premieres of avant-garde new music at the annual Time:Spans music festival. His at-home music practice involves extended unrecorded ambient improvisation and heavy slowcore basking, with welcome interruptions to learn James Jamerson lines and old calypso tunes.

Nicomo has played most of its shows at the late, great Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn, NY, but has also played at Union Pool, Sultan Room, C’Mon Everybody, many of the classic neighborhood clubs. Tour highlights have included Montreal POP festival, a house show in an earthship outside of Nashville, and a short residency on a short mountain outside of Asheville that was definitely a cult.