Sarah Nowicki and Matthew Robinson might have cut their teeth in the basements, attics, warehouses and patios of the Brooklyn DIY scene, but that’s not where Opal Onyx really began. It was, in fact, a hair salon in Cleveland, Ohio, where they first laid down the foundations for this astounding musical project. Robinson was the receptionist there. “I was begging for somebody interesting to walk in,” he says. “And then Sarah came through the door!”

Nowicki was in search of work, but also armed with a CD of self-recorded songs that demanded to be listened to. “I heard he played the cello and started getting really excited because I had all these songs. At the end of the day, flipped it to Matt, he listened to it in his car, turned straight back around, ran back into the shop and said ‘we have to make music together’.”  A few years later, when Robinson moved to New York, Nowicki soon followed, a deep creative bond now formed. 

There, they were immersed into the city’s DIY scene, a place where brilliant, boundary-pushing projects would emerge and disappear within the space of a week. Their sound was elusive and new, evading genre but somehow capturing something so transcendent that they could weave their way onto any bill in the city. “We’d be the one band with a cello at a noise gig,” says Nowicki. “Then we’d fit in to an electronic show, then we’d fit into a singer-songwriter show, then an ambient show. With us it was always different, a unique blend of styles all merged in to one.”

13 years later, New York has changed. Those basements and bakeries are no more. “We don’t go to Warehouse spaces anymore because they don’t exist,” Robinson says. “The most important cultural institutions in Brooklyn are all being shut down, and they’re not being replaced.” The studio where they recorded their extraordinary new album ‘Vessel’ throughout last year, as well as its predecessor ‘Delta Sands’ is among the casualties. “I would wake up in the middle of the night and I’d be there for 4.45 in the morning, I was that excited to go to the studio. New York is silent there at that time, it was like a playground. Now it’s been demolished and turned into a parking garage.”

There’s one thing that hasn’t changed; Nowicki and Robinson’s creative desire is every ounce as insatiable as it was when that CD exchanged hands in the Cleveland salons. The sonic landscape they craft is always shifting but feels permanent and always itself, like a deep, dark, river flowing slowly into the night. Steely electro morphs slowly and serenely into headspinning trip-hop, lathered in texture, then again into something organic and tender as distant sweeps of strings move elegantly into the foreground. Nowicki’s voice is the transfixing permanent presence, a guide through Opal Onyx’ mystic soundscapes.