Mux Mool
From residentadvisor.net
Minneapolis is in the middle of everything and the middle of nowhere at the same time, and that’s a set of characteristics you can sometimes hear in its music. In the case of Mux Mool, AKA Minneapolitan Brian Lindgren, he’s made a debut album steeped in tinny, IDM-tinged electro, whose parts nevertheless frequently sound sourced from different areas—the kind of self-made eclecticism borne of relative isolation.
Lindgren has excellent taste in plastic: the low-res bit rates of old Casios give them a weirdly perky decay, like the edges of a marker held too long on the page. That homemade feel brings a kind of nostalgia with it—it’s been a good ten years or so for everyone out to prove how finely an ’80s synth can tint things: hear the faint echoes of each overdub bounce off one another on “Get Better John,” for example. He’s frisky on the opener, “Ballad of Gloria Featherbottom,” as a tangle of keyboard lines go through a filter at the fade, and “Breakfast Enthusiast”‘s tinny breaks and molten low end galumph deliberately along in a way that calls to mind early Planet Mu. “Death 9000″ suggests Detroit while remaining firmly planted in Laptopia.
“Encladius” is a disco cut-up that still manages to sound handmade, thanks to crafty layering of twangy bass, fuzzy keyboards and sweetly sharp synth strings. As for “Morning Strut,” the closing number, you’ve heard variations on it for years: a tick-tocking breakbeat instrumental with a tingling or tantalizingly out-of-reach motif, played on bells or chimes or glossy-sounding keyboards. It’s one of those unofficial mini-pantheons that make life worth living: Peshay’s “The Real Thing (90 BPM Version),” Ian Pooley’s “Disco Love,” Omid’s “Arrive/Departure”—and now this track. Lindgren likes some fuzz on his needle: it’s an analog comfort. That it sounds as natural on Skulltaste as it might on an old Electric Ladyland comp suggests a healthy amount of self-possession. That’s pretty Minneapolis of Lindgren as well.
Words /
Michaelangelo Matos
Published /
Fri, 19 Mar 2010
