Miwon: "Pixels Lie"

The twelve-month ice age at City Centre Offices is slowly starting to thaw, making way for the kind of warmth the Berlin bleep scene needs at the moment—after all, the Offices crew were the only ones brave enough to openly practise IDM while at the same time wearing Bermudas. As luck would have it, resident originator and all-round good geezer Hendrik Kröz has returned from his exchange in darkest Siberia with a lesson in ice-breaking: the iTunes bonus track from his upcoming A To B album, and the final prying at the coffin lid of his reanimated host imprint. Ringing in at a little over four minutes, “Pixels Lie” is a deep shot of warm future disco that teems with scalpel-sharp machine code, written to honour “the ice at the heart of the city” (or “Eis im Herzen der Stadt,” as the android dominatrix supplying the vocals would have it).

Lord knows what any of this means, but, like Tarwater’s “World Of Things To Touch” or the early Toytronic releases, it reminds you at every turn why Miwon’s output to date is so vital: he’s one of the few electronic musicians who can roll his fetish for precision into a sphere and bounce it gracefully against the mirrorball. As synths grind calmly down to their molar bases, Kröz layers on a glaze of glowing valves, reminiscent of the jiving oscilloscopes he used to run current through his debut, 2006’s excellent Pale Glitter. If you claim any kind of interest in the feathery end of electro or just fancy indulging in an early Christmas of Casio beats, I’ll stake my wig this’ll keep you rosy until the album drops in November.