Microvictories is an album that manages to encompass both the complex, superbly controlled drama of the electronic montage and the physically and creatively energizing processes of improvisation.
Tracks are a beguiling, multilayered carnal invitation to immerse oneself in a continual cascade of arresting new shapes, fetishistic molecular particles, and harmonies that nestle together under the deep-toned thrum of large drums and ripples of heavenly ascension.
The overtones and rhythmic collisions on these works always seem redolent of instinct rather than mathematics. Even on some of the excursions into experimental electronica, there’s no feeling that musicality or improvisatory freedom have been traded in for an algorithm. An ego-less warmth does suffuse many moments, but it’s one spurred on by the seemingly voluntary ways in which these disparate sounds and natural events are enwombed in expansive spaces of flowing sentiments.
Much of it can be likened to electronica unfurling in a band-like setting. “The First Education” has a synthetic mist about it, within which electro-chirrups and rhythmic trickles cycle incessantly, until they eventually find themselves floating in a cloud of guitar echoes, cymbal accents and the bruised determinism of reverberating drum patterns. True to its scrapbook-like nature, other pieces skirt from throbbing dance numbers to the pastoral air of foktronica, softly percussive works set against abstract field recordings, and threadbare ambient dreams. As a sort of epiphenomenon, though, a consistent joy and sense of discovery rides overtop it all.
Max Schaefer
