Microstoria - _snd (1996)

What does come to your mind when someone shows you a music calling it intimist? Melancholy? Deep thoughts? A beautiful landscape, full of bright white clouds playing hide’n seek in a blue sky? The definition of intimacy when it comes to music tends to be associate with some pain, some forgotten romance (and I’m saying about myself). I used to have the same landscape dream when listen to the piano in Rachel’s albums, or to the sweet voice of a girl name Marissa.

This idea of intimacy could be positively amplify when we give attention to any of the little stories that are told by Microstoria.

Microstoria stands for a duo that worked in Dusseldorf mostly between 1995 and 2002 (please, dont forget these dates). And I’ve always preferred this project to the solo works made by the members of this duo. Mouse on Mars seemed to me too into a kind of fractured night music which didn’t make me dance; in the other hand Oval toke a path into the mechanics of abstraction and that didn’t tell me a word.

Here is the first thing I’ve heard from them, it gave me an opportunity to notice that new things were being doing in music. The album made me feel like watching a making of, and there’s where the idea of intimacy appears. The artists are very comfortable to be watched in their every movement. We, the listener, are allowed to watch every step; all the paths they take are visible to us: the wrong and the right ones. Witnessing all the details in their creative process we become voyeurs in this artistic autopsy, the music being used as a vehicle of impulsion to new forms of melody as the resulting material, then spreading the duo’s aesthetical message.

The important word here would be patience, because their music will demand a great portion of it. Patience in following their lines while they are deconstructing whole blocks of compact music, to rebuild a new and a quite exquisite notion of melody, of structure, of ambiance. A real image of what they were exactly doing in 2001 could be found in a declaration made by Markus Popps, saying that the electronic music based in analogical devices should be left in the past. They were committed with a loyal and entire dedication to the software as central source to create new music.