This time Herwig Holzmann’s got his eye on the details.
Not that he didn’t before, mind you, but Metro/Pol, his second album as Mono Peninsula (after a slew of frankly amazing releases as Photophob, among other things) literally takes the weight of his “tired dub” approach and increases it, bending his back until he’s face-to-face with the ground upon which he walks. From this vantage point he is inspired, six times, resulting in “Garden,” “Grass,” “Street,” “Hill,” “Path,” “Mud.” His feet stumble through them; his gaze registers them; his mind makes the connections.
These “monotonous, repetitive dub atmospheres,” “tape saturated ambient soundscapes,” and “lo-fi hardware explorations” are as tactile as they are ethereal, drifting in and out of your consciousness but solidifying their presence whenever they shift from the periphery to the immediate. They soundtrack the minutiae of the everyday, acting as accompaniment to the singular moments that often pass by unnoticed. As we slow down and get older, we become more attuned to these fragments — we ignore the blur of industry and economy in favor of the specific. We learn to embrace every flash of inspiration and appreciate every nugget of interaction.
We become more human that way, maybe.
Metro/Pol is available from Rohs! Records in Berlin as a limited edition CD.
More about: Mono Peninsula
