Michael Winter - Recursive Stall - CD (2009)

Labels: Magnanimous
Review by: Gareth L

Firstly, it was really lovely to get a hand-written note with this CD, I can’t remember the last thing I reviewed that had such a thing. Secondly, it was also nice to be sent the CD, in a CD case, with the finished artwork. After having reviewed CDs in the past that were merely CD-Rs in a plastic wallet with the band names scrawled on the front, this was a welcome change. So on to the music. What we have here is an of ambient electronic ‘digital art’, and if it was a piece of art it would certainly be abstract. Some of the tracks here are kind of dreamy and ethereal, like opener ‘Day of Hosted Suns’ and ‘TV Warren One’, bringing to mind moments of the ‘Endless Summer’ album by Fennesz, and a couple of other tracks are so minimal that, in the words of Patrick Bateman, they are ‘simply not there’, or rather there is very little there, as they drift past like a twig in a river – ‘Flaf’ being the best example and final track ‘Eloise’ also displaying this. The others are somewhere in the middle, ‘6equjs’ is perhaps the most notable of the bunch for being genuinely quite frightening, but overall this is a nice collection of sounds, not quite ‘Endless Summer’ but if you put the CD on repeat you would have endless Winter. Ahem.