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A split EP between Makunouchi Bento and Leenak, Miopedi:Errata is a four track download of effortless rumination and gentle melodic structures. The gossamer organic melodies of these tracks dissipate as you hear them, elusive strands of music that touch upon your consciousness like threads of forgotten dreams. Makunouchi Bento’s “Cariul C” plays out its gentle keyboard and drum kit duet as if the pair was on a deserted beach, playing their winsome lament to the gulls and the waves. Leenak’s response is “Nuits D’hiver, Neige et Radio,” a lengthy track which starts like variation to Bento’s theme, but spins off into nocturnal territory where you can’t see the ocean and the ships riding its surface, but you can hear them. You can hear the wash of the waves against the beach, the slapping of water against the metal hulls, the tapping of pipes and machinery as long slow boats turn towards the docks. The melodies dance at the periphery of your perception like distant pinpricks of sodium vapor.
While the first two tracks instill a sense of longing and retrospection in me, the third track — Makunouchi Bento’s “Lentila Dracului” — gives birth to a trickle of crawling dread. Arrhythmic bells clatter, a burr of white noise hovers in my right ear and the choral arrangement that wanders in sounds like the glorious Halleluiah of attendant cultists at their resurrection of their undead deity. Fortunately, Leenak’s “Tintamarre” washes me clean with the sound of its digitized ocean. The bells and the noise are still there, faint memories that are kept at bay by the gentle buzz and click of the electron sea.
The split EP of Miopedi:Errata is my introduction to Makunouchi Bento and Leenak.
I don’t know these guys other than the eighteen minutes I just spent in their company, but judging on how many times I hit “Replay” on this EP, I’d say they are welcome at my house any time. The second beautiful thing about this EP is that it costs you nothing but a thin slice of bandwidth for the short time it takes to download.
Miopedi:Errata is OUT NOW on One.
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The micro particulate fetishism of glitch music lends itself well to evoking a pristine sense of cold environments. The opening track of Relative Q’s Beauty and Her Broken Things is “This Child Born in Winter,” a six minute soundtrack to the beginning of life in the cold mid-winter. Filled with chilly precision and tiny elements which float in abstract patterns like random snowflakes, “This Child Born in Winter” fulfills the promise of the Internet: completely digital music delivered in a completely digital format.
However, after the minimal environment of “This Child Born in Winter,” Relative Q takes up a torch for the sort of keyboard noodling that spasmed and died in the 1990s. Other than the sheet metal tone drone moan of the two minutes “Dredging the River,” the next thirty-six minutes is spent thrashing about in a retrospective to Hans Zimmer style soundtracks to forgettable B grade movies of the early Nineties.
The descriptive text on the One website accompanying this release claims the attempt on Beauty and Her Broken Things was to replace the vocalist with an electronic singer, a digital recreation of the human emotions which are involuntarily expressed by the human voice, “where melody and accentuations seemly influence memory and emotion more than mere words can.” The only track that came close was “She Never Even Said Goodbye” — a winsome downtempo-esque pop song that doesn’t suffer too badly from a lack of human voice. Relative Q’s Beauty and Her Broken Things falls flat after a wonderfully promising beginning.
I go back and listen to “This Child Born in Winter” and feel like I’m listening to a completely different record. The good thing about Internet distribution is that, with a few mouse clicks, this is the only track from Beauty and Her Broken Things that remains on my machine. I won’t miss the rest.
Beauty and Her Broken Things is OUT NOW on One.
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