Much of the Mizati album ydna, released late last year, is a collection of slight elements aligned in unlikely combinations, among the most delectable of such combinations being those that mix emotionally remote piano lines with slender fragments of electronic percussion. There’s something special to how the piano here is almost inhuman in its simplicity, and how that spare quality allows for a camaraderie, a kind of cold simpatico, with the far more mechanized beat. The track titled, simply, “G” may be the highlight, its chords spaced apart to such an extent that they often decay fully before a new one enters in — an effect that is amplified, so to speak, as the close nears, when the decay fades into a drone that never quite seems to end (MP3). Pushing the album beyond being a straightforward experiment in minimalist pop are tracks that flirt with raspy techno, and others that employ unusual elements, such as saxophone and guitar.
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Get the full set for free download and streaming at tonatom.net, the releasing netlabel. More on Mizati, aka Andreas Groll, at mizati.de.
Among the many good things that have come from the increasing prevalence of drone-based music is a clarification, a realignment, of the word “industrial.” Thanks in addition to the rise in field recordings as broadly produced and consumed sonic media, the word “industrial” has ceased meaning simply a pounding nightife nihilism akin to an ersatz jackhammer beat, and come to mean a sonic aura akin to or actually resulting from a mechanical process. And that why it is a term that can be applied to much of Colliding Textures, a four-song release by Mon0 on the great Test Tube netlabel. The album’s initial two tracks, “Cathedral of the Lost” (
The so-called “long read” is a symptom of our time. It isn’t called the “considered read,” because anything, long or short, can be read with determination and attention. And it isn’t called the “long write,” because for one thing short pieces can take longer to write than do long ones, and for another phrases like “long read” are more likely to take root as common utterance if they flatter the audience. 
Someday we’ll learn — likely in some cross-functional collaboration between a sociologist and a musicologist — not only how it is that old-school hip-hop production thrives in the former Soviet Union, but also how it is that the two leading influences seem to be Pete Rock and DJ Krush. The great netlabel