Mikronesia dot com

City Paper Music Pick

The second release from beaty, bouncy Philly duo Gemini Wolf, Synchronized Eyes, swims in surreal Afro-pop arrangements and sublime vocal hooks. Think of them as our own Gang Gang Dance. Or think of them as well-studied pastiche artists with sharp ears and eclectic tastes. Whichever way, their record release party is Saturday — follow the band's heed and get your vibe on.

-John Vettese, Philadelphia City Paper

Umm...Drop Philadelphia Weekly

It’s the sirenlike vocals amidst Broken Social Scene-inspired synth melodies that first give you pause. But the slow morph into a bizarre Care Bear world of unnatural cheer and bliss that follows really catches the listener’s breath. And so begins Gemini Wolf ’s second full-length album, Synchronized Eyes. The morphing and melding of genres and influences continues on the album as the band laps influences from a pool that includes !!!, Fatboy Slim, the Faint and New Order. The addition of a string quartet and Afrobeat horn sections, however, turns Synchronized Eyes into a constant bag of surprises.?

Philly duo Gemini Wolf began as the project of Michael McDermott and Megan Cauley in 2005, though the two had played together previously for years. Since then, the lineup and sound has changed. The duo turned into to an all-out band on the first release, 2007’s Josiah , and then returned to a duo the following year. McDermott says, “I think we also had a little bit of a change in the direction of our sound and we wanted to document that,” resulting in the 10-song collection on Synchronized Eyes .?

This time around, the focus is more on the electronic aspect. “We didn’t want to make a total Warp Records-type album, where it’s just itchy beats with a female singing,” McDermott explains. That’s where the Afropop comes in.?

The album features a number of guest musicians, including members of local bands Shot x Shot, Normal Love and West Philadelphia Orchestra. Since McDermott and Cauley co-run the local label earSnake—which put out both Gemini Wolf and West Philadelphia Orchestra records—the decision to add a multitude of bright, brassy horns was a bit easier.?

“We tried to have more fun and funny and dancey songs, and less serious ones. I think people have enough things to be serious about right now,” says Cauley.

-Katherine Silkaitis, Philadelphia Weekly

Birthday Cake For earSnake

Philly natives Michael McDermott and Megan Cauley started the record label earSnake as an outgrowth of their experimental band Gemini Wolf, in which they play under the names Mikronesia and Pandar, respectively. earSnake debuted last December with a holiday podcast called 12 Days and from there released material by the shoegaze-prog band Zelda Pinwheel, twee folkie Lillie Ruth Bussey, and the ambient musicians Carl Franke and Ben Fleury-Steiner as well as their own projects.

This year they're upping the ante with a holiday compilation and a live showcase that not only cap off the label's inaugural year but spell big things for 2009. As if its roster wasn't diverse enough, earSnake is planning releases from electro-pop guru Shawn Kilroy, the quirky psych-folk troupe Paper Masques, hip-hop artists JSIC and Solomon Slowburn, the immaculate retro-pop band the Circadian Rhythms, artist-musician-producer Bilwa, and the Balkan-inspired collective West Philadelphia Orchestra.

That'd be an impressive slate for anyone, let alone a fledgling boutique label. We chatted with McDermott and Cauley about remaining true to one's tastes and daring to found a record label in this uncertain day and age.

Is it daunting to be releasing obscure bands both in a recession and during a drastic transformation of the music industry?

Cauley: "I think it's no less daunting than if it was a good economy. We're more like an artist collective and a label, so we're more about having a vehicle to get the music out there."

McDermott: "It's like a traditional label structure [in that] we split the money between the artists and the label. Because we're starting out, we focus more on the digital side. With the music industry changing, that's kind of worked in our favor because it's obviously cheaper to release albums digitally. I think we've only had two albums that were purely digital. For other ones we do print up CDs, but most of the sales have been digital so far."

Cauley: "And we usually just print and produce the [amount of] CDs we know we're going to need. I have a background in design and Mike has a background in web programming, so for us to develop our site and make it easy to download [songs becomes] easy to accomplish."

Do you think being in a band yourselves helps the artists have more faith in the label?

McDermott: "Yeah, I think so. I think most of the people on our label have either done shows with us in the past or known us a few years. They know we're not just picking bands based on what they look like and if they have a lot of fans. We're doing it for mostly musical and artistic reasons."

The label debuted this time last year with a holiday-themed podcast and now you're approaching the one-year mark with a holiday show and compilation. So it is like things have come full circle?

Cauley: "It's a time marker definitely. People view the end of the year that way anyway, to take stock and look back at things. It's more like a celebration too, to get everyone together in one spot."

Could you share some advice or lessons learned for anyone wanting to start a label?

Cauley: "I think the most important thing, and what traditional labels maybe lose sight of, is letting the music really dictate what happens and focusing on the music primarily. I know that sounds clich?, but if you really stick to what you genuinely like, you'll have a better label for it." McDermott: "And also, even if you are just starting out and doing things in-house, just try to keep it as professional as possible. Megan is a really good artist, so all the releases have had a really professional look to them. Sometimes smaller labels think that the artwork and having a well-crafted press release doesn't matter. But just from the ki

Little Berlin pushes collaboration buttons

When I ran into Martha Savery at the opening of A Closer Look at Arcadia she was very excited about the show at her space, Little Berlin. There's a collaboration in the Arcadia show (by long-time collaborators Tom Kocot and Marcia Hatton) and Savery had fostered some collaborative pieces at LB--between sound artist Michael McDermott and sculptor Michael Murray and with the members of the video Shift Collective. Shift's piece involved tossing an expensive video camera off a 6-story roof while the camera was on (it was attached to a rope and didn't hit the ground). Well, that alone was enough to get me up there.

The audio sculptures by McDermott and Murray are charming mash ups of found objects, motors and iPods that play sounds. One of the four pieces wasn't working but the other three tinkled and jangled and one, with boots, which was interactive, sounded like a fog horn. The spinning, found-object piece evokes memories of the boardwalk, wind chimes and merry go rounds. The piece with the boots -- which you pull down to activate -- visualized putting your feet to the fire (or, here, to what looks like a can of worms).

The sounds playing in Little Berlin's rough space with high rafters and peeling paint reminded me of David Byrne's sound piece, Playing the Building (see post). McDermott and Murray's work is more humble and experimental than Byrne's and I enjoyed it immensely. (I'm hoping it was fun making it -- it was fun experiencing the results.) Murray, by the way, is the sculptor. He's also the founder of art@sophi. And here's about McDermott from the LB press release: "McDermott is a Philadelphia based composer, musician, producer and sound designer. He co-founded the label/collective earSnake and has released music as Mikronesia and with his band, Gemini Wolf.

-From the roberta, the artblog

TalkTalk on the Fringe

The Rocket Cat Cafe is colorfully bedecked with found objects, mismatched seats and a fantastically conspicuous painting of Billy Corgan puking a rainbow. The floating debris is a perfect backdrop to Mikronesia’s Talk Talk, a conceptual undertaking that draws on spontaneous sonic bits to produce a compelling musical texture. Mikronesia is composer, musician and sound designer Michael McDermott, though it would be inappropriate to call this a one-man act. With the assistance of 8 microphones mounted throughout, McDermott channels his audience into ‘a real-time sound installation.’

The result is a collage that succeeds at distilling the musicality of idle chatter, clinking mugs and passing buses. McDermott broods in the corner over a laptop and an 8-track, regurgitating recent memories into a stew of unique aural moments. Speakers in the middle of the room hum ominously beneath looped coughs, bright gospel-tinged exclamations and kitchen sounds that pop like a fireworks finale. The organic mix gasps, wheezes, bubbles and farts playfully over a crackling undertow.

McDermott notes that the size of the crowd has varied through his Fringe Fest residency (Sept. 2 to Sept. 12) at the Rocket Cat, directly influencing the piece he creates. The modest Thursday evening crowd held hushed conversations and sipped coffee with occasional awareness of McDermott’s surveillance. The relative sparseness of available sound served for an evocative patchwork of moments. As McDermott sampled selected microphones, he summoned rhythmic patterns from footsteps, lyrical melody from the passing comment of a female patron and extra-terrestrial harmony from the eerie split second of an otherwise pedestrian moment. Ultimately, Talk Talk is a well-conceived and effective demonstration of the musical inherency of everyday sound.

-By Dave Tomar, Phrequency

vxvii Review

"The final curtain call was made and Kikapu left the field with VXXII by Mikronesia. As the cover art suggests, a departure means also a new beginning. In this case the production is opened by a dampened piano and unconnected stutter samples. A deep bass regularily accentuates the first quater note. Tight 4/4th structure. The music is indecisive whether to stick with the melodic similarity to J-pop ballad kitsch or to fall apart in fragmented sonic events, which are more compliant to a typical electro acoustic production. And and therefore noisy samples remain desintegrated ornaments and interfere with the mellow piano line.

Fortunately the remainder of Mikronesia’s VXVII is much more focussed and consistent, where all components work as a whole and contain melodic lines that serve as binding element between the glitchy chord snippets and layers of noise. Moments where Mikronesia unfold their musical potential with soundscapes of iridescent beauty. Hibersea is another strange orchid in the morning sun, with confusing bitonality, distant hallucinatory female voices and pentatonic theme progressions. Mikronesia also undertake forays into Minimalist music, with subtiles changes in modulation and micro details or explore the noisy distortion of the later Oval. Gate could even run as digital Psychedelia with hammond organ emulations and resonant feedback vibrations that come close to the sound of a sitar.

Apart from the opening track, the remainder of the release turns out as a well thought, contrastive and a joy to listen to. Mikronesia's VXVII is a worthy final chapter of Kikapu's history and a recommended download in my opinion."

-Petcord

vxvii Review

"The latest Kikapu netlabel release, Mikronesia's vxvii, is one of its best ever - nine tracks of Satie-esque electronica....

....The Mikronesia collection serves as a fitting endpoint for the label, which has long emphasized gentle atmospherics, field recordings, and light glitch. (Kikapu also hosted its share of melodic, beat-driven electronica, which is virtually absent on this album.) The comparison to Satie is particularly strong in the watery piano on the opening piece, "She Brings" (MP3), but it's reinforced throughout due to an approach by which every track, no matter how loudly it is played, seeps into the background. Haunting voices are filtered through bells and reverb on "Hibersea" (MP3), and other high points include the textural white noise of "Moke Cene" (MP3) and the insectoid field recordings worked into "Part" (MP3). Get the full set at archive.org."

-Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet

Iris or Comfortable Too Review

On the excellent Gears Of Sand comes a new release by Mikronesia, of whom we know nothing. He uses the sound of grand piano, but entirely treated in the field of computers. Now that is something of a small tradition of this year, following whatever we already had in this direction, from Fennesz/Sakamoto to this week's Machinefabriek. The piano can be recognized as such, here and there and throughout this album. The recording process, in which Mikronesia did a first approach in processing the sound through analogue apparatus, and then do some improvisation. The recordings of that were then edited and further treated on the computer, and the seven pieces on this release are the result. It fits the recent tradition of computer treated piano music quite well, but I must admit it doesn't necessarily add something also. It's great, it's warm, it's glitch, but it's also more of the same. The same of Fennesz/Sakamoto, Martin Herterich, Feu Follet, Red Needled Sea, Krater, Son Of Rose and Machinefabriek, to mention those other piano/computer musicians of this year. Each with their own specific sound, something that sets them apart, but the differences are small. Mikronesia certainly ranks among the best.

-Frans de Waard, Sonic Curiosity

Iris or Comfortable Too Review

Mere moments after the first tender piano notes of Iris or Comfortable Too, you know you’re headed off to interesting territory. The sound suddenly wavers like a disturbed reflection in water and swarms of electronic burble begin to move under the surface. From there it just gets more intricate as composer Michael McDermott takes Eno-esque ambient piano and tugs, tears, and twists it, submitting it to a host of electronic treatments to create new, unique aural textures. His manipulations run from the extreme to the subtle. In “No Rage” the notes are picked apart element by element and stitched back together in a rough quilt of beautiful, glitch-ridden imperfection. “(The) Lye Owl” is a slow and graceful piece built on carefully layered atmospherics with a distinctly dramatic tone. “Genre” and the closer, “Oil Vet,” leave the piano mostly alone as McDermott applies a comparatively lighter hand to the effects and distortions, and his playing show itself as elegant and thoughtful. (“Genre” spends it last minute in a pleasant shower of effects.) “Nyca” throbs its way in like a subtly shifting waveform trying itself out over and over, changing ever so slightly on each pass. “Lebu” rolls in with a sparse, dark beauty, hard-played chords left to stand alone and drift apart in echo, the space between each becoming thick with expectancy.

Since I was compelled to listen to this CD three times straight through right from the get-go, it's definitely a Hypnagogue Highly Recommended CD.

-Hypnagogue

Iris or Comfortable Too Review

"Now this is just a gorgeous CD. Using 2 laternating styles against each other, Mikronesia delivers a deliciously mellow and warm sound using reverb drenched pianos that sound almost classical at times, such is the skill with which the phrases are played. It's simple but incredibly effective and really evokes a certain feeling of depth and sadness... luscious. The flipside of this is the more experimental ambient pieces, once again using pianos as the basis and then treating them via laptop processing. Really quite a lovely piece of work that comes recommended."

-Smallfish Records (UK)

Iris or Comfortable Too Review

Mikronesia is the nom d'art of Michael McDermott. Piano has been his favourite instrument since, as a small child, he was sitting on his grandmother's lap while she introduced him to the infinite world of the 88 keys. Yet, as life brought in its influence under the form of other involvements (namely playing with various bands and solo electronic music), the artist left the original object of interest alone for a long time. In 2007, though, McDermott decided to go back to the big box, exploiting its timbral properties to conceive a brand new composition mixing the best of two worlds (with a Harold Budd/Brian Eno inspiration, just for starters). Modifying the results with a laptop and an assortment of pedals, Mikronesia serves now an album that surely doesn't sound neither "Eno" nor "Budd" and is indeed quite personal, this being the feature that made me focus on it a little bit longer than my usual average in these genres. Many of the sounds heard are kind of suffocated - like perceived with a pillow on our head as we desperately try to sleep, the neighbour's daughter practicing her solfeggio exercises in the contiguous room - and, when in headphones, sometimes a distinct distortion creeps in. Not sure if it was meant to be there - we're not talking Vangelis-like engineering here. But all those strange electro-deformations - reverse reverbs, glitches, broken waves and interrupted drones - amidst this general atmosphere of "ugly beauty" somehow work well, and in the right conditions and circumstances this is a CD that could introduce several nice revelatory moments. Give it a good test. "Amorphous ambient for discriminating minds", anyone?

-Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes

Tissue Paper Ghosts Review

"Glitchy ethereal ambience - beatless in places, carried by programmed percussion in others. The album opens with twinkling electronics and reversed notes all crackling with jumping static as if the signal has met with interference. There are effects like distorted little Chinese gongs, voices swirling and echoing as if captured from a broken radio broadcast, montaged cuts and snips of sound, there are softer tonal washes below - wistful and meandering. On the third track an electro-groove is introduced, light and graceful - stronger rhythms carry track four 'Del Rio' where a pumping synthetic bass drives reverberating chimes and some strongly effected spoken voices. Mikronesia use a number of repeated loops to ghostly effect - indeed there are some hauntingly beautiful passages especially toward the end of the album where synthetic strains gently intertwine, wavering somewhat unsteadily as half-remembered speech flickers in and out of earshot."

-Paul Jury, Morpheus Music

Tissue Paper Ghosts Review

Recording a concept album based on the musical interpretation of dying in a car crash certainly sounds morbid. One would expect a lot of dire, depressing and dark soundscapes. Thankfully, Mikronesia (aka Michael McDermott) realizes that beauty can be found in death, not just sadness and pain. Tissue Paper Ghosts is a fascinating amalgam of assorted forays into electronica, glitch, minimalism, noise, and ambient soundworlds that encompasses a variety of moods and motifs, but beneath it all beats the heart (an ironic use of words, that) of a human being and indeed one who is adept at expressing emotions in uncommon ways. From first hearing the first sound clips on the Gears of Sand website to my repeated playings of the album once it arrived, I was held spellbound by the way in which McDermott weaves so much feeling into music which, if described technically and analytically, would seem anything but warm and inviting.
“Slow Bleeding” opens the CD amidst fuzzy noises, a wailing siren, scratchy radio interference, and a general sensation of disorientation, aided by the distorted barely heard voices of people in the background. No doubt meant to convey the moments immediately after the horrific car crash, the listener gets the sensation that one is somehow dimly aware of the impending end but is casually observing it and is no longer very concerned about holding on to the last vestiges of life. The overlapping chattering of bare voices at the end leads to the first occurrence of “melody” on the CD, that being “Untitled Love,” which blends funereal organ drones with slightly-off kilter reverberating tones. The organ’s inherent warmth and comfort counterbalances the skittering tones so that the disturbing effects of the latter are smoothed out by the enveloping washes. Later on, the piece becomes more abstract with snatches of repeated melodic refrains at the periphery and the appearance of ethereal female voices amidst a backdrop of scratching effects.
We cross into the heart of the recording with “Arms bent (The Detached and Lazy Feeling of Bliss)” a spot-on blending of glitch ambience with elements of collage (owing to the use of spoken word female vocals deep in the mix) that somehow sounds “cheery” without veering away from the mood of the CD (this is, still, an album about death). Percolating bouncy beats erupt after a bit and the assorted happenings in the song all gel together to form a delicious “whole.” However, McDermott doesn’t sit still and continues to introduce other factors into the mix throughout the song, including some noisier stuff which some may find out of place but which I thought fit right in.
“Del Rio” reminded me of the electronica/chill-out music heard on Mr. Soon’s places in arizona CD (on psychosomatic records), anchored by a mellow bass beat and peppered with an assortment of tones and notes ping-ponging around the soundfield. “Long Walk Up 611” removes the upbeat nature of the two previous cuts and returns the album to a more thoughtful and somber theater of operations with sampled hand percussion (tabla, perhaps), several weird electronic effects, distorted sung vocals and straight-up spoken words, but once again it’s all anchored by a warm organ-like drone. This track is a bit hard to get ahold of, so it’s best to let it simply wash over you. Two more short cuts (the more appealing of them being “Softly Coil” which offers a blend of beats, shimmering reverberating synths, and underlying washes/drones) serve as precursors to the closing track, which also is a fitting conclusion thematically. “Remember/Home” is a nearly eleven-minute ode to serene ethereal ambient textures (bordering on warm spacemusic, a la Braheny or Demby at her least ostentatious). After the drama of what has come before, it’s easy to perceive this as t

Tissue Paper Ghosts Review

"Gears of Sand is one of the more professional CDR labels. Nice design, full color label artwork, printed on the CDR and great music . . . a nice release of melodic ambient music that is throughout these eight pieces rhythmic oriented in a sort of tribal/pseudo ethnic way, a bit like a more mechanical Rapoon, with mumbling voices here and there, chilly synths and all other fine ingredients for solid atmospheric music . . . The music doesn't grab one and force you to pay full attention, but perhaps that's not the idea of Mikronesia. In another life, this would be a more adventurous ambient house thing, reminding me of Meridian Dream (but I might be the only one to remember). It's pleasant to listen to while doing whatever you do; not too demanding music."

-Franz de Waard, Vital Weekly

Tissue Paper Ghosts Review

This CD from 2005 offers 41 minutes of edgy ambience.

Harsh sounds are harnessed and forced into the subservient service of ambient structure. Grinding diodes croon with suppressed vigor, resulting in a form of subjugated sedation that is hardly conducive for meditation, but exhibits pacifying demeanor nonetheless. Looping voices are mangled and utilized with ethereal effect. Pinging keyboard notes punctuate an electronic fog that hums and breathes with melancholic influence. When coherent chords finally appear, they are swiftly swamped by a seething pool of chaotic vocal consistency. Beats and chugging electronics hint at a melody that seems to gradually consume itself.

There is no overall quality to this music other than unpredictable expression. Far from unpleasant, the tunes possess a strange attraction that turns its own eccentricity on itself until an engaging charm is generated out of these unconventional aspects. Mikronesia display a versatility with converting chaos into order while retaining an edge of discord that exudes its own appeal.

-Matt Howarth, Sonic Curiosity

Tissue Paper Ghosts Review

Tissue Paper Ghosts finds composer/producer/laptopper McDermott stepping into his role as solo sonic seducer for a meditative drone-scape adventure based around the psychic remains of a car crash. Though slowly enveloping melodies make the softly clanging "Untitled Love" and the blip-filled "Arms Bent" gorgeous and sedative, woeful winds and menacing crickets aren't far behind, infiltrating unsettled tracks like "Slow Bleeding" and the swooshy, buzzy "Happy Birthday, Goodbye." Overall though, the tender TPG—much in league with say, the instrumental side of Bowie's Heroes—is a cleverly quiet joy that doesn't let you rest in peace.

-A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia City Paper

Tissue Paper Ghosts Review

One thing I enjoy about ambient, noise, and chill music is the way that they have so many little offshoots. They resemble streams in a single river that do not directly converge, but sometimes meet at a huge delta, where this trickles into that. Each stream of ambient listeners travels in a separate but somehow interlocking set of streams and eddies. Each river sells a couple of dozen copies each, to devotees of each sub-genre.

Like small home-based churches of strictest protestant faith, though, listeners of those genres related to ambient sometimes operate with one true vision of the way that music must be created and experienced. To one group, the use of beats in material robs it of its ambient salvation. To another, any sound other than minimal drones becomes suspect. Each group has its own heresies, its own purities, and its own apostles' creed. Sometimes this can be comforting, as with artists who stake out a worthy small niche of sound, pure unto itself, as a charming construct. Sometimes this can be amusing, as with internet articles by ill-informed dance music fans who make statements along the lines that the genre "ambient music" was invented on a techno dance-floor in a pick-up bar in Stoke, UK, in 1995, when Ian and Kevin discovered this old device called the mellotron. Once in a while, it can be just like watching a deep denominational schism in a church with only twenty members—intriguing, but not, ultimately, satisfying. As time goes on, I try to dissolve all my mental rules about what "is" and "is not" ambient music. I wish to live in a wash of sound, not in mere doctrines, deeply cherished, about what sound "should be."

Mikronesia's Tissue Paper Ghosts provides an album not narrowly confined by genre. The first piece, "Slow Bleeding," mixes ambient elements with a panoply of sounds and samples that would ordinarily be found in a piece from the noise genre. Others of the eight pieces range across a spectrum from fairly "traditional" drone ambience into chill with pleasant beats. This is not a "purist" album of hidebound doctrinaire ambience, but instead an eight-ply panoply of ambience, noise, glitch, and chill. To me, the most effective piece is "Del Rio," which I would label in the "chill" category, filled with simple melodic vigor.

Those who attend one of the small, home-based "churches of ambience" may not be attracted to Tissue Paper Ghosts, because it is not a narrow-cast genre piece. Those who, like me, strive to no longer see ambience (and its fellow traveler genres) in such narrow terms will find much to enjoy in Tissue Paper Ghosts. The content is imperfect, though the music is consistently solid. I found some of the dense samples buried in the mixes quite intriguing, but some sounded a bit "been there, done that" to me. Yet the presentation herein is never boring.

They say that hybrids have added vigor. I can certianly attest that hybrid guppies are the hardiest ones. Mikronesia's Tissue Paper Ghosts is certainly a vigorous hybrid, and worthy of attention from those who have left the church of faithless creed, and entered the faith of inner musical salvation.

-gurdonark, "The Ambient Review"