(07.15.07) Erstwhile breeding ground for the next generation of the old IDM vanguard
— of the Proems and the Quenches, the Sparks and the Vesnas – n5md, its
post-Gridlock tone once set by head, Mike Cadoo, continues in slow-dissolve
from bespoke electronic listening music into boutique post-rock shoegaze
indie- and folk-tronica. If Proem’s recent A Permanent Solution represents
a stubborn cleaving to the old template by one of a still committed few,
then Micalavera is emblematic of the bandwagon trajectory. Damiak’s jump-on
is further testament to n5’s desertion of the (perceptually) depleted
IDM-coalface, its once dreaming steeples of cloudbank synths arcing across
beat skitter scatter no longer beckoning. Now it’s the call of the
post-rock wilds, with its array of instrumental fiddling and clunky
concatenations of math-y motifs. It’s an area that suddenly, mysteriously,
seems an inordinately bounteous resource to many, as if some sort of mass
epiphany had occurred. Or did the post-digital generation just tire of
their digi-toys and discover Real Instruments? (Hey, cool! A
glockenspiel!) No, digitalia is not totally passé, it’s just used to make
their new-found instruments sound “cooler.”
The slide started with flagship n5 acts Bitcrush and SubtractiveLAD letting
the odd admiring glance at post-Cocteaus and New Order indie-goth pop grow
into full-on gaze, so it shifted from influence trace to dominant template
trait. Fuel was retro-siphoned too from the Tortoise tank, and more again
from the likes of spiritual father of electronic-acoustic hybridization,
Fourtet/Fridge. Now we have the whatever-generation likes of
multi-instrumentalist Abe Dichi, established n5-mafia man, abandoning the
glitch-laden IDM of his 2004 Pesero 7-inch for an insipid farrago of
electro-acoustic doodle and digital fidgetry. Micalavera‘s opener “Safe
Passage” announces its remit, commingling glitch-fizz and acoustic
derivations, folding in the likes of music box tinkle and harmonium wheeze
(“Tall Hat Greeting”), and gently beating. While the plinks and tootles and
dongs are paraded and pasted, that indolent hood-eyed trudge beloved of
that rock-that-rocks-so-little-they called-it-“post-” starts to
pedestrianize the precinct. On the likes of “Tenuous Gears,” Dichi filches
from Múm’s recipe book, while “Tepid Coat” plays Let’s Pretend with
Explosions In The Sky, bringing all the ponderous resonance of that tumid
slow-build quiet-loud to the straining table.
Enough. It will doubtless be earnestly documented elsewhere how Micalavera
“marries organic instruments with field recordings and electronic editing
techniques.” Or perhaps how the “blending of the analogue and the digital”
is “a key factor in what gives this album its air of individuality.” But
this mix has not only been down the pipe, but reached bottom, been
dispersed, treated and recycled and gone back to the top, before coming
down again. And its average specimen (and a lot are distinctly average) is
as deficient in distinction as the IDM bit-peddlers lately squealed on for
crimes against the genre state. Lest it be taken personally, this is no
Damiak attack – a pleasant enough practioner of this whole plinky plonk
post-rock-cum-digital-folk-art. It could be Efterklang, Mice Parade, or
whoever. The thing is to recognize that this musical mixed marriage – of
twee with grandiose, of folk(s)y with portentous, of cute with grungey —
is getting everywhere, and is riding for a demystifying debunking. So
consider this a whistle-blowing act. Far from being hip’n’happening, this
strain of -tronica should be recognized as just another (newer) orthodoxy
— one fossilized in the patchy pastiche of Micalavera. [Purchase
Micalavera is out now on n5MD.
