vinyl / cd / dl
Cusp Editions
2018
mastering Rashad Becker at D&M
review

Boundless solar oscillations in exquisite cycle; this new record from Miki Yui is as playful as it is mesmerizing.
An album delicately crafted from field recordings, synthesizer, solar oscillator and sampler. Yui is known for the unique nature of her music (apparent also in past collaborations with Rolf Julius, Klaus Dinger), and whilst Mills retains the subtlety and sensuousness of her earlier works, these new coherent and lucid compositions are charged with a narrative tension we’ve not heard before. 

Dial Sun opens the album as an early morning call. Sounds flicker and flop, not a care in the world, amidst scraping and intimate electronics, escalating toward a frenzied outro. The subdued unwind of  Granite follows on in a laminose exploration of metallic samples upon fragmented melody, fleeting and windswept as a lost memory. The hollow-sounding language of sputtering synthesizer and warped samples creates a rhythmic strangeness in the album’s shortest piece, Salute. Otherworldly overtones with a cooler feel characterize  Mica where long elegant feedback slides between dissonant swells, thick and granular as though emerging from electronic canyons. Solareo is the album’s major work at 13 minutes long, and invites the listener to meander through dense almost reggae like chord-beds, slow pulses and a raucous of bizarre synthetic glitches. The cyclic reprise of  Dial Moon returns to the playfulness of the opening track with dancing rhythms and turbulent hooks. Tones like whispers fade into quietude, toward a silence warm and balsam. Miki Yui’s harnessing of solar energy, both materially and symbolically, feels like a joyous salute to the sun in all its manifestations.