Browse by Label: MICROCOSM

Artist:	HONIG & MORGAN, EZEKIEL
Title:	Early Morning Migration
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	CD
Price:	$11.50
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1009CD

"Ezekiel and Morgan are longtime friends and come together here for a collaborative environment where quirky, abstract rhythms meet colorful ambient melodies. Fragments of expressive sound rub up with real world edits, clanky percussion and long melodic passages. Simultaneously repetitive and dynamic, these songs find the rare space in sparse beauty and musical ingenuity. Supremely warm, deep pianos and looming, textural pads create a world that is introspective and melancholy just as much as it is friendly and inviting; just as natural and organic as it is electronic. The two met through mutual acquaintances in New York City, where Ezekiel is from, and where Morgan had relocated from Boston (after growing up in New Hampshire). For this album, each producer contributes their individual styles and abilities, Morgan using his methodical approach, which is heavily informed by his classical training, alongside Ezekiel's more observational, cut and paste perspective. Keeping each other in mind, each track helps its surroundings to build an expansive arena, incorporating microrhythm and modern composition."

Artist:	SOCKS & SANDALS
Title:	Shatter EP
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	12"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1011EP

"Socks and Sandals return, demonstrating exactly why they fit Microcosm perfectly. Their tracks are filled with nuanced minimal funk, depth of sound, warmth, and a style all their own, aided by quirky, self recorded sound clips. It's quite difficult to put all these pieces together in a DJ friendly EP, but they do it with the class of veterans. 'Shatter' is grounded in a shuffled rhythm, glued together by a vocoded, bleepy hook, cowbells and claps. Rich bass underpins everything and adds to the largeness of this tune, which excels in sound design and original arrangement. 'Lacky the Liger' rolls with a clean, slow build groove, attached with distorted vocal dispersements and flippant sound effects. 'Found in Space' combs through clicky rhythms and analog bass rumbles with ease until reverbed guitar adds an otherworldly element to the track, giving it an airy poise reminiscent of hollowed out tree trunks and ending in a rainstorm, while 'Peerless' rounds out the release with lilting rhythms providing the backdrop for whispered vocal traces and grey matter atmospherics."

Artist:	SAIDSOUND/KRILL.MINIMA
Title:	Macrofun Vol. 4
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	10"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1012EP

"Overview: volume 4 of the split 10" series picks up with additions to the Microcosm roster, including our first original tune from a German artist. Saidsound's 'My Laundry is Drying' pairs tempered, stuttery, swaying rhythms with repeating, resonant tones and creaking murmurs. Truncated vocal stirrings sit in a background of a gathering crowd, providing space and texture. Krill.minima's 'Iltia' is a dubbed out, melodic, techno fit stargazer, steeped in haze and melancholy, with occasional twangs and twilight musings, emitting warmth in a rhythmic stew of subs. Other info: Saidsound is a new project from Microcosm label head Ezekiel Honig, loosely defined as aligning itself more along the midtempo techno lines, less melodically driven, and perhaps a bit darker than his usual output. Krill.minima is new to Microcosm, but is well known for his releases on the thinner Netlabel and others, as well as for his work as Marsen Jules, most notably, his Herbstlaub album (released on City Centre Offices in early 2005), which received an amazing response from the music world at large."

Artist:	HONIG AND MORGAN PACKARD, EZEKIEL
Title:	Early Morning Migration Remix EP Vol. 1
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	12"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1013EP

"The Early Morning Migration CD was the first collaboration between Ezekiel Honig and Morgan Packard, and fused tracks made separately by each producer into a uniquely focused yet varying set of pieces with warmth, ambience, and real world soft techno edits. This 12" is the first of two presenting some of the original CD tunes on vinyl for the first time, alongside more uptempo remixes. For the first volume, 'Socks and Sandals' take elements of various tracks from the original CD and rework them beyond recognition into a consistently moving, skimmed down techno opus. Bass figures motion to and fro throughout, underpinning the rhythmic skitters which are squarely reduced towards the discerning dancefloor. Ezekiel Honig uses sounds from 'Tropical Ridges' and 'Planting Broken Branches' in a midtempo groover brimming with sunset melodies, whining, wheezing and baggy effects, and clippity cloppy percussion. They all create the peripherals for what is at heart a different take on the same romantic ideals of the original tunes."

Artist:	HONIG V. NICHOLAS SAUSER, EZEKIEL
Title:	The Road to Victory EP
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	12"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1014EP

"Ezekiel Honig and Nicholas Sauser split on this 12", each contributing an original track, and remixing the other artist's track. Mr. Sauser kicks off the A-side with 'Goca Chino,' slithering voices bobbing in and out of the ether of a bassy, minimal dancefloor gem. A seriously pitched down vocal phrase connect the dots with sideways sound bits and classic tones, forging Sauser's way ahead, holding the past and future in each hand. Mr. Honig reworks 'Goca Chino' using various elements from various versions of the original tune, into a midtempo techno texture brimming with odd percussion and the impending pitched vocal signpost. Deep, droning pianos round the edges, closing out in late night splendor. The B-side opens with Honig's 'Going Sailing,' minimal techno from below, a dark bottom pad scraping the ocean floor, with almost choral like gazes sharing space in a barrage of teetering, tattering soundbytes, clipped claps, vocal dispersements, and shuffling backgrounds."

Artist:	SAUSER/BEN PARRIS, NICHOLAS
Title:	Slaughterhouse/Vampire X-ray Eyeballs
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	10"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1015EP

Macrofun Vol. 5. "Volume 5 picks up with tracks from the Northeast US once again. Nicholas Sauser returns with a turning tune fusing the most raw pop elements into bass heavy minimalia. Using his voice as a major sound source, vocals would be an odd way to put it, but heavily processed, edited, squelched out creepy crooning is not distant from the truth. He fills in the crevices with loopy 4/4 fluctuations for a track which satisfies evenly for the club and the home. Ben Parris, known for his Double Wimpfighter EP on Foundsound, makes his Microcosm debut with a slab of vintage minimal funk with modern updates. Bass tones play background for heavily disguised bytes of voice, scrapes, scratches, open hatted hooks, choppy snares, and other destructed and reconstructed sonic alternatives which house a tight techno basis and provide proper surroundings for abstract dance music."

Artist:	SOMEONE ELSE/DITCH
Title:	Yeah, Yeah/William
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	10"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1016EP

Macrofun Vol. 6. Volume 6 unites old friends with new ones, the commonality being prominent use of the human voice amidst the quirks which lend both tracks elements of abstraction and pop sensibility. Someone Else + Miskate present "Ooo Yeah," which skips and grinds, sashaying around vocal shutter phraselets and deep, bumpy bass and kick organisms. Ditch's "William" plonks and plinks with tinkering piano lines. Whining and murmuring throughout the track, William, whether real or fictional, comes to life all over this adventure in detailed techno arrangement.

Artist:	HONIG, EZEKIEL
Title:	Scattered Practices
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1017CD

This is New York City native Ezekiel Honig's third full-length release on Microcosm. It hardly surprises that Ezekiel Honig's Scattered Practices takes its inspiration from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (originally published in 1974 as L'invention du quotidien. Vol 1, Arts de faire). Just as the French philosopher's text examines how individuals transform and thereby personalize elements of mass culture -- rituals, utilitarian objects, language, street plans, et al., so too does the New York composer allow sounds culled from everyday life to assume an integral presence in his own work. By manipulating an original sound so that its identity is obscured without being wholly lost, Honig imbues the seemingly mundane with an intricately developed sonic richness. Beyond the album's conceptual dimension lie the compositions themselves, multi-layered spectra of warm micro-melodies and tonal motifs enveloped by organic rhythms and textures. More intimate than his previous releases, Scattered Practices extends Honig's idiosyncratic composing style into ambient, techno and electro-acoustic environments. The album's ten minimal settings incorporate a modicum of sounds, typically a skeletal core of gentle heartbeat rhythms accompanied by the resonant glow of entrancing keyboard figures and a mutating array of found sounds (churning crackle, rustling clatter, distorted voice effects). With its muffled Rhodes chords, softly rocking shuffle, and percussive rattles and clicks, "Homemade Debris" perfectly encapsulates the album's textured aura and lulling ambiance. The beats ever so slowly recede over the course of its 10-minute duration, leaving in its wake a sonorous symphony of dreamy melancholia -- a description one could just as easily apply to Scattered Practices as a whole.

Artist:	SOMEONE ELSE
Title:	Happiness For Our Time EP
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	12"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1018EP

Philadelphia's Someone Else returns to Microcosm, maintaining his signature sensibilities in sound design that is riddled with found sound edits. The title track is a midtempo popper with bass tones, various vocal nonsense and reverberating twangs, permeated with beepy occasions, high mid-range instrumental themes and fiddlestick percussion. "Happiness For Our Time" leaves the listener guessing through its controlled arrangement of incidental sounds and loopy drums. Nicholas Sauser remakes this, infusing a dark Chicago sensibility in the mix. Finally, "Carespray" uses a low sub bass and snappy snare to hold onto all the deep speech garbles and loops which play back and forth with each other.

Artist:	MISKATE
Title:	Afterblaster
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	12"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1019EP

Miskate extends musical boundaries by imbuing her tracks with a unique brand of woozy, gauzy funk. "Afterblaster" opens with a soliloquy via telephone and progresses to a steady, midrange-heavy bassline that groups together a host of Miskate's own vocal blurps and boos, twangy hooks, oak-filled percussion and nuanced production. "People Began Sequences" shows resonating fuzz and rumbles of catchy bass -- the result is a carefully-crafted micro-shaker. Nicholas Sauser remixes the title track into a miniature, late-night version, turning this into a modern, introverted techno tool.

Artist:	SOCKS & SANDALS
Title:	Rishi Saturn
Label:	MICROCOSM
Format:	12"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	MCOSM 1020EP

Nicholas Sauser and Clark ov Saturn return with three new tracks. Their new material extends the spirit of their previous work into an expansive universe of minutiae. On "Spaced," shifting rhythms make friends with xylophone, whistling, synth stabs, rumbling bass, and processed speech. "Pura Vida" is a dark bumper with plenty of chugging high-end percussion. A disembodied chorus sways around analog bass that seems to rip through the fabric of the song. Deceptively minimal, the "Lucidril Remix" sounds as if it were recorded at a large party in a cave. Galloping, rhythmic permutations and snare snaps crumble and rebuild as swooping washes and nonsensical utterances coax it along its chosen path.

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