Monoceros :: Tales For Silent Nights (Fueradeserie!/Imaginary NonexistentRecords, CD)

(03.18.07) The great democratization project that’s come with ever-widening computer-mediation has not been an unalloyed blessing. Now that anyone with a computer and some software and half a clue about how to use them is empowered to indulge their (sometimes little more than wishful) creativity, there’s a need for greater quality control to be exercised at source. There was a time when this was the remit of record label operatives, but in this day and age, with the means of production in the hands of the indie-workers, anyone can put a vaguely professional-sounding electronic product out there with scant consideration of market-flooding.

Late in the day, then, too late for the clear blue IDM-sky, it’s hard to treat this, the second album by Barcelona’s Joan Malé aka Monoceros, as much more than a further exhibit in the mounting testimony to virtual musical redundancy and a maxed-out electronic sub-genre. Jointly issued by local label Fueradeserie! and Malé’s own Imaginary Nonexistent Records, Tales for Silent Nights might just as easily have come out on Neo Ouija in 2003, Toytronic in 2004, Expanding in 2005, or Cactus Island in 2006. The point being that TFSN is more or less standard issue beat-enhanced keyboard-driven melodic electronica of the type we’ve grown over-accustomed to over the last half-decade. Familiarity breeds if not contempt then something unhealthily related, as these years have seen boutique IDM-electronica labels replicating each others’ operations and issuing enough soundalike works to induce jadedness in even the most enthusiastic of palates.

TSFN opens divertingly enough, with the drift’n’crunch of “The Day We Become One” still gambolling about, still womb-warm, but the collection rapidly cools and interest palls, as pedestrian structures plonk past in linear limbo. Proficiently sculpted pieces like “(The Big Wave),” “Warm,” and “Happiness” are twinklingly appeasing enough, but as they list this listener gets listless, as this undemanding post-millennial easy listening cosies up, pirouetting prettily, in resplendent vacuousness. Halfway in, it occurs that Monoceros did in fact deliver a moderate album When I Was A Child I Wanted To Be Astronaut for Expanding in 2005, but TFSN brings nothing further to the table. Centred as it is on clunky glitch-stitched beats and customary rather than customized synth-wash with a stroke or two of guitar-pluck, it struggles to make any impression beyond the bare interest maintenance its generic gestures seem content to limit themselves to.

Tales For Silent Nights is out now on Fueradeserie!/Imaginary Nonexistent Records.

• Fueradeseri! / Imaginary Nonexistent Records
• Monoceros