On first listen I was nearly ready to just write this album off as a mid to late period Autechre clone with some BOC style analog sounds added in as an attempt to get some more kick out of an old horse. Thankfully further listens showed that there is indeed more to this release than it just being another production heavy IDM record. After all there’s so many of those around that we don’t really need another one.

While Mormo wears his Autechre influence firmly stamped on his sleeve in glowing neon, he does add his own feel into the mix. Especially when it comes to the melodies. There’s something about the slippery way Mormo does melodies that you just can’t seem to grasp onto them. The moment you think you have what he’s doing in the palm of your hand he’ll suddenly throw you a curve-ball like a series of out of key notes or a complete direction change. It’s like chasing someone down a maze of tunnels, just as you’ve nearly caught up to them they dive down a side street you didn’t see and you almost have to start again. But thankfully it’s an enjoyable chase and not a frustrating one.

When it comes the the rhythm and general sound you can’t escape away from that Confield feel with a bit of “Chiastic Slide” in there to add some stability. Mormo undoubtedly does it well though, he is clearly adept at the art of sonic manipulation and microscopic rhythms but as good as it is, you can’t help feeling from the rhythmic side that you have heard it all before. However he has a lovely command of grainy ambiences and sweet almost uncontrolled basses.

I enjoyed this album the most when I stopped analyzing it and just started listening to it. Letting it flow over me and not trying to grasp a melody or a style. As I said above, the melodies try to escape away from you but I feel that this is intentional as if you’re not meant to get the melodies and are supposed to take every individual little change by itself, as your unconscious mind does when it simply floats over you. The other thing you get from this as well when you just listen is you almost start to feel some of the artists origins coming through to you. As if the record has somehow managed to capture some of the Greek sunshine in-between the notes and ambiences.

All in all Wasting 500 Sounds is a very well executed album with expression that you can allow yourself to disappear into. However the fact that it feels very derivative at first may put some listeners off if they’re unwilling to put the effort in.

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.

A new star has risen in IDM territory. Papergoose Records already released his debut EP entitled A mouth full of small barks, but now it’s time for Low Impedance Recordings to continue this musical career of Tomasz Kaye with a lovely glitch album. The broken rhythms and tiny sound particles have been thrown in the right order, due to which rhythmic structures appear with a stubborn character. Just great!

Finally, a sound designer who knows how to keep it musical. Tomasz Kaye is a software scholar (he gives lectures on subjects such as “Making beats in Ableton Live‿) and master of idiosyncratic IDM along the lines of Monolake, Boards of Canada, early Warp label artists and the Schematic label’s oeuvre (Phoenicia, Kiyo), while bringing plenty to the table (e.g. his 500 sounds). Kaye nods heavily to the great Autechre, but eschews their more conceptual and abrasive elements, clinging to warmth, hooks, song forms and melodies—and he knows how to drop a beat and run with it without tiring or boring his audience. Kaye values playfulness even during the more exploratory passages (“Vomputer‿, “Inland Chime‿) marrying his abstraction, non-representationalism and microtones with quirk and direction. And of course he does know how to push the DSP limits, adorning the record in inspiring sounds and textures. After all my rants about 200 GB hard drive jokers who proverbially purge all over tracks with fancy software and plug-ins (i.e. Richard Devine, Otto Von Schirach) someone listened.

In early 2006 the label Low Impedance Recordings released the debut album Loftway by the artist Kamotek and it was subsequently written about here. Not much was heard thereafter, however the label has since then shown a remarkable show of force and proving it are three recent excellent as they are different releases by: Mormo, Tokyo Mask and The Missing Ensemble. The first of the three is by the artist Mormo and the amusingly named Wasting 500 Sounds full-length. An in all aspects accomplished release filled with broken and cut-up electronic sounds produced and recorded with flawless attention to sonic detail. The quality of this release is outstanding and naturally it comes highly recommended.

Das griechische Label hat es sich wohl mit diesem Album zum Ziel gesetzt, die Welt der zerbröselten Beats und melodisch verklärten Soundeffekte, für die z.B. Rephlex einmal stand, nicht einfach so aufzugeben, sondern mit einem Monster an guter Laune und Vielseitigkeit in Perfektion wieder aufleben zu lassen. Glitch, eigentlich eine gute Erfindung. Und so spielerisch und ausgelassen definitiv immer noch etwas, das einen um den Verstand bringen kann. Mich jedenfalls. Und das nicht nur, weil es technisch so funky ist.

Bouncy electronics parse with glitchy percussive effects in a sea of textural resonance. The electronics are lively and often frenetic. Harsh pulsations mix with heavenly tones to achieve a tasty balance of razor sharp and velvet sounds. This atmospheric backdrop serves to temper the agitating demeanor of the forefront electronics, subduing the agitation factor maintained by these buzzing sounds. Bubbling diodes provide a cheery edge to the edgy tunes.

The percussion is heavily cybernetic, pursuing an artificiality that is the heart of this music. Erratic tempos generate an unpredictability that runs rampant through the tuneage. Stable rhythms of a sinuous nature conspire with random beats to produce a flow that is engagingly eclectic. There are passages in which the chaos factor dominates the harmonics, plunging things into a surging panorama of electrified commotion. And then the music emerges with renewed vigor, sparkling and revitalized by the embroiled interlude.

These compositions display a meticulous air of emphatic stimulation. While melodies exist and are quite bewitching, the charged miasma that surrounds these central themes flourishes with carefree determination, aspiring to fuse unconventional structure with an pop sentiment flavored by a haunting ambient foundation. Invariably, the flurrying agitation wins out.

I’ll admit right away, I didn’t count how many sounds are being wasted away by Mormo. The idiosyncratic distorted idm approach of Mormo’s aka Tomasz Kaye’s electronica music helped me endure through several lonesome nights of urban darkness. I felt like a creative industry nomad staring into the dark and rainy night waiting for the light of life to shine in, but the atmospherical coldness and distancing of Mormo’s music by way of paradox intervention made the hours easier and more warm and laid back. Music like that has to work on glitches, breakbeats, radically ever-changing rhtyhm patterns and melodies hacked so into post modernism they seem like single sparks of tones rather than a continuous line. Because our lives have turned away from continuity and towards a constantly rising amount of chaos and complexity.

According to the principle of entropy, somebody else’s life has to become simpler and easier to be controlled for every step my life takes loosing control and adding layers of complexity and new problems. And it should also work vice versa. If that would be true and also measurable, it would change our lives around completely. We would have to refrain from solving our problems, because it would mean heaping problems on somebody else for no reason at all. And it would mean that as soon as something problematic happens to us, we can go out and find the culprit even if we never even heard of him and his acts have nothing to do with us directly, except for the universe striving for balance. However, it would mean getting to know a lot of new people and quarreling with them, which would lead to more people finding new problems and would end up in a hundred percent chaotic war situation with everyone against everyone else at the same time. Hopefully music like Mormo’s can take some pressure off.

“wasting 500 sounds” doesn’t seem too special at the beginning, but it grows with time. The fifteen tracks on the CD shift into one another and from the mastering and production, especially the cut off and jumping structures of most sounds it is hard to say when one track starts and another one ends. It is usually easy to guess when you are well in a new track, though. You’ll best find your way through this record by keeping track if the various miniscule elements and not the big picture. The helicopter view of this music is like an english farmside landscape with hundreds of small patches of different fields, and only those who have grown up in this area and lived there for the bigger part of their grown up life find their way around and now which patch is whose.

Chaos and order mingle without losing their central features inside the mix of percussion patterns and keyboard melodies. Especially through the middle part of the record, there are a lot of parts where the drum-programming seems almost random but starts to make sense by the addition of various kinds of sound colours and layers that spread over the blistering tracks. “Ming”, “Ringlets” and “Vomputer” are especially performative examples.Mormo might not add a whole new chapter to the book about electronica that Richard James wrote, but it brings a whole new colour into the possible ingredients of this equation. No, a dozen new colours, that range from the cool breeze knocking your feet when spring goes away again and the weather gets colder again in the springtime to a blistering and crackling fire that warms your frontside and leaves your back cold. If Kaye had to victimes not more than 500 different sounds for this, then it is more than okay. That is a worthy deal.

Mormo: “Wasting 500 Sounds” is somewhat akin to a homage to Autechre around the “Dratft 7.30” period, maybe they’re using the same type of software as the edits, flow and feel is very much like the electronica produced a couple of years ago. That said there’s still a good level of attention to the details on offer.