The first time I heard μ-Ziq’s Bluff Limbo I felt lost. I stared emptily at the highway before me, frozen in thought, tumbling in a moment stretched to forever. As someone supposedly enamored with IDM, how had I not heard this record before? This was intelligent dance music as its own galaxy, a portentous vacuum of every corner of electronic music that moved me, like a preordained compilation of my own personal history with the genre. It made me paranoid. It made me happy. It made me want to dance.
It wasn’t until I caught a glimpse of my face in the rear-view mirror — a blissful, tranced-out rictus — that I snapped back to Earth. This was a smeary smirk etched by Drum n’ Bass, pluming electro, and ambiance flotsam carried on a stream of glitch-damaged rhythms. It was too much.
Thankfully, this same practiced nebulosity resides over “Braindead Moth,” a freshly posted cut from μ-Ziq and fellow Planet Mu labelmate iTAL tEK. Anti-gravity tones, crystalline synths, and numbing sub-bass make up this collaborative effort; it’s spacious, submerged, and wonderfully lulling. As FACT report, the duo (under moniker Mick & Alan) recently put the track up on SoundCloud, along with a brief description of its origins. “Mike and I were compiling tracks for my Nebula Dance album about a year or so ago round his house. After the 10th cup of tea and the 100th demo we decided to try and write a track together.”
This is the kind of one-off collaboration that would have been all but impossible to track down 15 years ago, but we are living in the future, folks, so here it is for free; stream it (below), download it, show it to that friend you know won’t like it no matter how good you tell him it is.
• Mick & Alan: https://soundcloud.com/ital-tek/mick-alan-braindead-moth
• Planet Mu: http://www.planet.mu
More about: iTAL tEK, Mick & Alan, μ-Ziq
