It is almost superfluous to support the importance of the Boards of Canada and “Music Has The Right To Children” in electronic music and beyond. Boc is the art of nostalgia, a clear and aquatic sound that is actually easily reproducible today with the most recent plugin And laptop. On YouTube there are dozens of videos that explain how to make “roygbiv” or some other raid among the melancholy melodies that, together with Aphex Twin, more than any other have characterized Warp Records' melodic side. But, however theirirs texture Today they have been fully revealed and their including hieroglyphics do not exist so many emulators. The reason is simple: to miss, among the ambitions of the discoveries, it is the same sensitivity to compose arpeggios that marry warmth and sadness.
Mpu101, this sensitivity, however, knows it all right. Arrived at the sixth album, all entitled as cryptic as the moniker Used, behind the discreetly cacophonic name, there is a Polish artist born in 1984, imported to Germany and now an integral part of the Ilian Tape family, the one led by the Zenker Brothers and who in his ranks finds prominent names for the Clubbing Contemporary as Skee Mask, Stenny and Andrea. That Ilian Tape was known for his heterogeneous approach to the Techno movement was known, but with Mpu101 the label welcomed the fertile territories Ambogressive Amber silent producerof which there are only one handful (literally) of photos that depict it semi-cope and with modular synthesizers behind.
Modular is a method of sound construction here tangible from every pore: the injection analog It is transmitted in the embrace of micro-inflexions nightmate (“goodbye”), sinuous arpeggios that are lost among the diaphanous candles of a reductionist sound (“Oberheim Junction”). The only distortion is the presence of fillers: if the first half of the release It is able to touch deep feelings, in the second half the intentions are not as intense.
But let's focus on the strengths. Each song consists of two or three instrumental lines, synthesizers who float with subdued to create airy themes and imbued with inner resonances. It is as if Jean-Michel Jarre fell in love with the ambient-emo (“Rachelnv60”) or as if the Radioheads sold their instrumentation in exchange for a piston darkened with only a modular synth (“Panasonic Kid”); But, and above all, as if the Boards of Canada were reduced to the essence, stripped of the rhythmic section and held up by the emotional depth that has always distinguished them (“3100beta2”).
The work of “Mpu106”, in any case, is not a plagiarism at all; His is only a soul that knows how to touch the right ropes of feeling, meetings and separations, distances and rapprochements. Without laboring, armed only with some sound synthesis tool.
29/04/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
