As Designer Merkin reveals its rubberized experimental mystique, these forty-minutes of liquid logarithms are far from lost at sea and rather close to the shores where its audience can digest their diluted structures.
Müd’s latest for Buried In Time is Designer Merkin which pushes boundaries even further than its furry cover art may depict. Passing through dub-laden streams of tumbling DSP connected to muddy bass (listen to “Trampling Robo Death Squad,” for example) and you begin to appreciate the unlimited palette of sonic creativity Müd has to offer.
Autechre/Gescom followers are usually written-off as mere bedroom musicians vying for that one break, that one chance to make a splash in the proverbial sea of musicians. Müd captures that certain Autechrean dynamic with ease; broken beat patches, electro’ish contours, fragmented melodic bursts, syncopated rhythms (busted at the edges), crackling precision and a sprinkling of funk to keep things in motion. “The Flux” and “A Smoke Break With Captain Spankowitz” contain a particular strain of Skam-injected dirty funk making it difficult not to notice its slithering groove. “K Street Blues” adheres to experimental noise-pollution placed somewhere in the next century as “Maggots” couldn’t be truer to its title; the sounds of miniscule creatures eating away at live wires and broken teleostereograph machines is rather disturbing and also right on point. “Plasmosis” breathes life into minimal-techno brushed against faded squeaks, bleeps, clips and crunching. The eight-minute closure (“Psi Beam”) progresses via dribbling percussion, swirling atmospheric notes and a hypnotic synthesis bringing Designer Merkin to the forefront of next-level electronics.
As this album reveals its rubberized experimental mystique, these forty-minutes of liquid logarithms are far from lost at sea and rather close to the shores where its audience can digest their diluted structures.
Designer Merkin is out now on Buried In Time. [Release page]
