Mormo: Wasting 500 Sounds
Low Impedance

Wasting 500 Sounds by Mormo (Holland-based Tomasz Kaye) offers 50 minutes of razor-sharp glitch, splintered noises, and fractured rhythms in the grand Merck tradition. Calling to mind artists like Fünkstorung and Machine Drum, tracks like “I Only Want” and “Prumptone” weave skeletal arcade melodies, bass throbs, broken funk beats, and writhing showers of noise into three-minute vignettes. Intermittent ambient episodes and galaxial soundscapes (“Gumbler”) add variety though also slow the album's momentum a bit too much when the balance shifts too heavily in their favour (“Ming,” “Crybaby Owl”). Kaye's clearly a solid practitioner of the electronic beatphonics genre but, over the course of the album, one starts to wish he'd focus his talents more on tightly-focused machine-funk like “Inland Chime” and “Ginsob” and less on loose-limbed soundscaping sprawl. It's not 500 sounds that are wasted by Mormo but rather the opportunity to make the strongest impression possible.

January 2007