The 4th volume of Microcosm's amazing Macrofun series delivers an ambitious blend of dense soundscapes and melodic fragments within a spare almost melancholic framework. Combining dreamy, repeating rhythm patterns and dense atmospheric layers of found sound footage, this 10" not only showcases Microcosm's outstanding and unique musical output and direction, it also underlines the significance of the New York based project within an increasingly evolving minimal music context.
With "My Laundry Is Drying" saidsound aka labelhead Ezekiel Honig enchants with a sparse blend of subtle rhythm loops, wispered vocal fragments and a diffused midtempo groove. The repetition disguised as a linear, changing flow of events, rather than a repeating cycle, creating a marvelous deep and touching atmosphere of compelling minimalistic beauty. krill.minima is the exotic ambient project of Martin Juhls based in Dortmund, Germany - best known for several releases on various netlabels such as Thinner and Miasmah. His track "Iltia" on the flipside melts a dense ambience and off-centered textures with spontaneously emerging melodic tunes driven by more uptempo grooves, making his contribution a truly remarkable debut.
(Minlove)
Following past Macrofun volumes featuring Tundra, Captain Campion, Miskate, Socks and Sandals, Someone Else, and Honig, the fourth installment couples saidsound (a new Honig alias) with krill.minima, a guise donned by Martin Juhls (perhaps best known for his Marsen Jules stunner Herbstlaub). saidsound's "My Laundry is Drying" nurtures its hypnotic vibe by streaming a gently wavering shuffle pulse through a mass of clicks, syllabic voice fragments, and field noises; a rather dark undercurrent shadows the textured piece, despite its generally restrained ambiance. An industrial ambiance haunts "Iltia" too, though in this case Honig's subtle menace is replaced with soft sparkle. Bathed in a hazy cloud and seeped in melancholy, the subtly euphoric "Iltia" is ambient dub-techno of the finest vintage, and the pairing of starlit themes with an insistently percolating squelch proves marvelous.
(Textura)
Fourth release in this fantastic 10" series from one of the finest stateside minimal labels out there. Ezekiel Honig dons his newly christened saidsound guise to offer a hypnotic mid-tempo chugger filled with random, crispy sample snippets and subtle rhythm patterns - most enjoyable. Germany's krill.minima handles the B, with a more upbeat, bubbly, textural tune for dark, late night dancefloors and warm sound systems. Nice work once again from Microcosm.
(Dean DeCosta - BPM)
