Review Summary: crisp beats for ur sweaty summer
I took my sister’s dog for a walk today - it was a time. We (me-dog-sister, but in this case me-dog) get on, but he’s been indulged from paws to tail for most of his life, and so he expects to spend as much time as he so pleases sniffing each individual flower, tree trunk and patch of stale piss we come across. I don’t so much ‘walk’ him as facilitate this snail crawl to the best of my ability (past resistance has been painfully futile). Scotland’s notorious permagrey was on a rare timeout, and so we were treated to a cloudless sky, the kind of stale air desperately in need of mother’s nature’s sweet south-westerly breath, and what I began to view as a frankly unacceptable outpouring of solar energy. It was hot. I was hot. Don’t walk a slow dog on a hot day: the hotter the dog the slower the walk, and the slower the walk, the more your imagination starts to conjure up all the far better things you could be doing than walking said dog on said day. I could have been reading my book in the window seat of a cool room, drinking some strong cloudy lemonade, listening to something overall refreshing but with an unheated sense of energy to it…
Sudden shocking revelation:
Magic Pony Ride was the record I needed in my life at that moment.
The hugeness of this statement takes a little unpacking: if you’d told me even a month ago that µ-Ziq’s latest would be the sound to quench me on daydreamed summer’s day, I would have laughed in your face, waved my marginally-less-pallid forearms around, and screamed something along the lines of
you’ve never even seen
real sunlight unsubscribe from the Warp Records newsletter immediately you silly silly nerd. Though he’s never been signed to Warp Records, he’s one of those names practically synecdochial for that ‘genre’-defining 90s IDM roster, usually the fifth or sixth name down the full list depending on how quickly the person citing it remembers Squarepusher and whether or not Plaid gets a foot in the door. I’ve enjoyed the odd µ-Ziq track, but for the most part his sound is much of a muchness, an optional extra course of whatever you’d expect from an artist of that style of that time, with particular inclination towards drill ’n’ bass. He belongs to that lineage self-consciously ‘unconventional’ ideas being programmed to life in artificially lit rooms; how does he fit into my sunlight?
Well, it’s perfectly viable to view
Magic Pony Ride within the shadow of
that arm of IDM, but the bottom line is that it’s a solid easygoing breakbeat album packed with buoyant basslines, airy combinations of cut-up vocals and saccharine high-end synth tones that, often enough, are honing in on
overtly gratifying melodies. There’s your cool glass of lemonade - well bloody played, µ-Ziq. At its best, the record brims with effervescent hooks and delightfully straightforward appeal: “Uncle Daddy” and “Turquoise Hyperfuzz” are the kind of songs I can imagine lighting up the playlists of even the most electronic-shy of listeners.
It’s occasionally a little oblique (“Turquoise Hyperfuzz”’s rhythmic breakdowns feel purpose-built to add a little edge to what’s otherwise the IDM version of straight candyfloss), but packs little of the clutter so often associated with µ-Ziq's quintessential-but-not-quite-essential style. Even when that category does crop up - “Picksing”, say, is a classic IDM-adjacent frittering between a dozen semi-related melodythings that don’t stick in the slightest - they don’t stick around long enough to sour the tone. A little brevity more generally wouldn’t have gone amiss, however: as a 52-minute record oriented around a single palette,
Magic Pony Ride is a tad more highlight-centric than need be, and the space between the emotionally pent “Goodbye” and the perky “Magic Pony Ride (Pt. 2)” immediately springs to mind as a dry patch.
Nae bother! For much of its runtime, this record is anything from a user-friendly chillout to an ecstatic microrush; it’s earned its place in my summer, and you’d be well-advised to afford it some space in yours. Stay hydrated!
