★★★☆☆
Martin Gretschmann has an idea about what happiness feels like, but sometimes displaying dejection comes easier. The veteran producer takes pleasure from a strange but true opening of free form folk mixed with chugging deep house creating a dance floor expo where you can see all the parts, pistons and mechanisms of Mst pulling together in time. It’s a set up, fully extended on “A Clone is a Clone,” that wants to be recognized as a feat of organic engineering rather than something that’s fun to look at and listen to. As if too tired to entertain, “Palomitastep” trundles along and “Equation of Time” labors with a dubby head, like the springs to the jazz clockwork have worn down to erratic levels of Gotye-like performance.
It makes for fascination as to why Acid Pauli sounds so phlegmatic. “Eulogy to Eunice” weeps over ivories, presumably for a lost loved one or freshly dissolved relationship mentioned in the title, and though “Requiem for a Loop” raises a smile when sat at the same piano as Pauli opens and loosens up a little more, the glee is scuppered by the attention span of “Mutron Melody” randomly fiddling with the pitch control. Whether indiscriminate or complicated, Gretschmann working away in a small cut off shack illogically creates budding rhythms, and forms a knack for dancing in confined and cramped isolation.
File under: Console, Nicolas Jaar, Nôze
