MIKO
Parades
PLOP005CD
Plop 2008
12Tracks.  46mins57secs

Beyond the surface diverseness, a deep consistency and coherence can be heard in the debut effort from Miko, an artist dwelling in Yokohama, outside Tokyo.  The pieces bear traces of someone who was willing to relinquish a certain control, to make herself the instrument and allow each self-contained event unfold according to its own internal dynamic.

Works like Kingdom and Ride On Time thus come across as much as natural processes as proper songs. The former features slow spasms of low rent keyboard noise and electronic wiggling, to which Miko adds compositional elements – sumptuous vocal harmonies, lazily strummed acoustic melodies, and dissipated cymbal and percussion sounds – that gives a bare overall structure.

This soundworld gets richer and more pressurized over the course of its duration, but then it also sinks into languid melodic continuum’s and almost epiphanic latticeworks of water-color textures and pregnant, buzzing fly atmospherics.  In whichever direction Miko heads, however, she takes very small steps; and she shows a real skill in rendering significant the miniscule contrasts and nuances of her sound.  For all their fragility and intimacy, for instance, her sounds are simultaneously hard and glistening as diamonds, and are precisely worked and carefully laid to rest in an uncluttered, expansive sound-field.

3/5

Miko (MySpace) | Plop (MySpace)
Buy: CD

ROD MODELL
Incense & Black Light
PLOP3
Plop 2008
10Tracks. 57mins57secs.

With Incense & Black Light, Detroit-based minimal techno producer and Deepchord Records manager Rod Modell has produced a work more unseemly than probably even he realizes. While Modell’s early work was concerned with electro-acoustic experimentation, he’s since entertained cinematic space-out fancies and, more recently, beat-oriented music lined with traces of both dub and house. This album, his most coherent and effective, is thus a jarring but delightful collision of influences and inspirations.

The tracks display a furrowed brow focus on a particular sort of hunched, anxious groove, one caught between dub’s half-time skank and techno’s blithe forward motion. Modell then folds into this a welter of hiss and scratchy, gunmetal grey textures, punctured sensually by echoplexed horns and yellowing dub bassline frequencies.

After the spray of technicolor energy provided by the first few beat-oriented tracks, positively alive with jumpcuts and snarled-up accumulations of noise, the album slowly comes to rest in subdued throbbing and eerie muffled discharges of sound, which give a vivid impression of what a life spent in close proximity to power lines street cars must be like.

Modell apparently recorded and reconstructed the material of this album during the middle of the night, and this seeps through the pores of the music’s mood and manner. In its mimicry of city-life, with its daily rhythm and hum of machinery, the album is more physical than mystical, but Modell manages to find the latter in his source sounds with surprising frequency. All of this makes Incense & Black Light a rootless signifier of twenty-first century urbanity.

4.3/5

Plod
Buy: CD