- The music on Lee Gamble's UIQ label is effortlessly experimental. The textures are alien and the structures are unpredictable, but the strangeness never feels belaboured. Tracks often orbit the dance floor without fully committing to it, keeping one foot in the avant-garde and the other in techno. That balance has resulted in a handful of head-turning records. The winning streak continues with the UIQ's latest EP, from Hungarian producer Martin Mikolai, AKA S Olbricht.
More straight-laced than N1L's funky bump or Lanark Artefax's IDM lineage, ZZM is UIQ's most club-ready record, despite plenty of eccentricity and detail. The A-side is for DJs. "137x3brk" is a spacious house track, with a brittle organ riff sprinkled over the top. "Ktyring" cushions its heavy kicks with a healthy dose of reverb. Everything sounds soft and dewy, evoking the misty side of early '90s techno.
That track has a simple but poignant pad sequence that swells until it eclipses everything else. It's one of ZZM's best moments, and its doleful mood carries over to the B-side, where Mikolai indulges his ambient urges. Built on eerie hums and idle machine chatter, "J UC" skulks to the finish line, rounded off with bit-crushed synths that call back to Actress's landmark Splazsh. "F10a1" goes for broke with the EP's most dramatic melody. It feels a little too obvious at first, until Mikolai fades in some galloping drums, turning it from mawkish ambient to hands-in-the-air fare. Like the other records on UIQ, ZZM tinkers with dance music conventions without completely taking them apart.
TracklistA1 137x3brk
A2 Ktyring
B1 J UC
B2 F10a1