My first con­tact with Matthew Mer­cer came about almost ten years ago through mutual friends. We imme­di­ately bonded over criss-crossing musi­cal tastes and a con­stant hunger for new stuff to lis­ten to. He was also an extremely tal­ented com­poser with for­mal train­ing and a real ear for ten­sion. Early music was under the Systm name and fit in with the IDM sound of Autechre, Phonem, Arovane, etc. His pro­gres­sion into dance music was soon piqued by the glitch techno work of Akufen and the way that IDM sounds were given a new lease through 4/4. Soon enough he was releas­ing sin­gles on Forte and Neu­ton­mu­sic which bridged the gaps between techno, IDM, glitch, and electro.

Cur­rently, as one-half of electro-pop group Micro­film, the wry humor and irrev­er­ent music ideas you learn from talk­ing to him are on full dis­play. How­ever, there is another side of Matthew that I’ve always wanted to see blos­som, a mostly beat-less exper­i­men­tal side focused on his clas­si­cal piano back­ground that would pop up in ran­dom tracks he sent me over IM. I still have some of the early ver­sions of tracks that appear on his lat­est release, Pianis­simo Pos­si­bile. Hear­ing them all together presents a sort of decon­struc­tion of his musi­cal back­ground and prob­a­bly best rep­re­sents what goes on in his head from day to day.

In con­trast to his work with Micro­film (and his prior solo releases to some extent), this new work is dark in tex­ture and seri­ous in focus. By build­ing the sounds almost purely from piano, the music is extremely cohe­sive and free of dis­trac­tions. “And The Sky Opened Up” is a won­der­ful exam­ple of how he uses piano to form a rhythm and syn­co­pated melody at the same time. This is the type of sound exper­i­men­ta­tion that attracted me to Type releases. There’s some­thing just so ver­sa­tile in the kind of sounds pianos can make when put through the ringer.

Although it’s not all warped keys here, as “Your Sun-Faded Pho­to­graph” is a beau­ti­ful and wist­ful piano piece that reminds me slightly of Rafael Anton Irisarri’s first album on Mias­mah. And cer­tainly “The Art of Eye Con­tact” is one of the most epic elec­tron­i­cally crafted piano pieces that Angelo Badala­menti never made. As the equally cin­e­matic “One You Me Too” draws to a quiet close, it’s a great moment to see a friend expand their oeu­vre in such a self-assured way, like a present to him­self and to the peo­ple who have watched him grow over the years.

Get it now at Band­camp.

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