XTEP is a feel-good welcome back from Paradinas, featuring familiar tropes and trademarks that are part and parcel of why so many fell in love with μ-Ziq.
The year is 2013, and damn it all if it hasn’t been a great comeback year for major artists on the electronic scene so far. Autechre have already killed it with their super star-destroyer sized Exai, the first new Boards of Canada in eight years is on its way and now here we are with a brand new EP from μ-Ziq, with the Chewed Corners full length following in June. All that’s left is a new Aphex Twin and you’ve pretty much got the set.
μ-Ziq isn’t quite like his peers, however, having released under a number of other aliases and mixing his disparate styles up between them considerably over the years. It’s also much harder to nail down exactly what it is that Paradinas’ music has that puts him up there with the big names. He has a knack for nailing killer hooks and melancholy melodies that fuel the nostalgia buds as well as a keen instinct for injecting fun and frivolity when it’s needed, and in the end perhaps it is a combination of these together with a certain je ne sais quoi that makes the mu-Ziq formula work, and will keep listeners coming back for decades to come.
With that said, then, is this a new era and a new sound for μ-Ziq or are we progressing along a familiar path with the requisite 21st century spin? On the evidence of the material on XTEP it would seem to be the latter, but there are larger plans afoot here so it would appear that this is quite deliberate. The five new tracks on XTEP are a return to the happier, brighter and more optimistic vibe of old, brushing away the cobwebs left in the wake of the darker, most sinister and destructive Bilious Paths and Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique albums. XTEP is a feel-good welcome back from Paradinas, featuring familiar tropes and trademarks that are part and parcel of why so many fell in love with μ-Ziq.
The title track is like a trip through a museum of 70s memorabilia, all warm and fuzzy with smeared moog melodies, blurry, knees-up piano chords, arpeggiated funk and clattering percussion. Meanwhile, “Ritm” retrofits a nineties rave into an eighties local pub, the piano upright and jangling rather than clinical and electronic, glimpses of Slazenger-synths peering through murky stained-glass windows.
“Pulsar” goes all eighties sci-fi disco with gaudy, Astro Chicken electronics and a shimmering sheen of glitz and retro-futuristic optimism. “Monj2” references footwork with its top speed, tinny clatter and hyperactive, uneasy/queasy melodies, and “New Bimple” ends XTEP on a reflective, slightly unresolved note with pensive piano solo, two-step rhythms and restless synths.
μ-Ziq takes us on a fond, nostalgic journey back to the good old days with XTEP, the self-referencing nature of many of the tracks never getting in the way of good, old-fashioned fun. But it also feels like a farewell gestured with the forthcoming Chewed Corners looming in the distance, one that sees Paradinas redefining and taking his sound to new levels, in particular embracing the footwork scene in its potent new formula. This is a new μ-Ziq in the making and quite, quite wonderful.
XTEP is available on Planet Mu. [Release Page | Artist Page]
[itunes id=”640710671″]
