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On a basic visual level, DJ-producers Nikki Nair and Hudson Mohawke are a perfect study in contrasts. The former is a South Asian artist living in Atlanta with soft features, long hair, and brown skin. The latter is a skinny Scot, hair shorn high and tight, and skin as pale as can be. They even chose divergent outfits for their joint appearance last week at Holocene: Nair in earth tones, Mohawke in white.
Creatively, though, the two are very much in sync. Their 2023 collaborative EP, Set the Roof, was a perfect melding of the men’s musical aesthetics. Mohawke’s love of crunchy textures and squealing tones made a balanced equation with Nair’s cleaner, sleeker take on electro and acid house. And the current b2b DJ tour that the pair are on, which included much-lauded sets at this year’s Coachella, gave them plenty of room to show how even their solo efforts dovetail with ease.
The two traded tracks, pulling away the beat and the bass for long stretches before dropping them back into the mix to the audible delight of the capacity crowd. True to their mutually arch approaches to dance music, those moments were less head-on collisions as they were like finding purchase on the road after a quick sideways skid on some black ice. They also left plenty of space to shift genres at will, with diversions into lowrider hip-hop and robotic drum ‘n’ bass amid the house and techno pulsations.
Mostly, it looked like they were just trying to show off for one another. At several points, Mohawke’s eyes and grin would grow wide as he marveled at his partner’s song selection, and Nair would find himself lost singing along with the tracks pumping through the PA. If the music wasn’t infectious enough, their onstage enthusiasm did the trick.