Leaf
 
I was introduced to Murcof's work with last year's Utopia single and I was hoping that the follow up album to that would be as good as the single promised. With Remembranza, Murcof does not disappoint. It's difficult to say where this music would fall in record bins filed by genre, but what matters is that regardless of the conventions of the particular slice of the musical spectrum that Murcof is working in, he manages to fill his songs with depth and atmosphere. Remembranza is full of distant, reverb soaked pianos, suspensful string arrangements that hang in the air like smoke in a dark, shady pub, and autoclave-cleaned beats that nearly fall into minimal techno rhythms, but rarely serve as the impetus for dance. The result plays out like techno noir made for headphones rather than dancefloors. This is music for murder mysteries and hardened gumshoes and crazy dames, but it's all controlled so precisely that it never evokes a real, urgent sense of dread. People not usually won over by the abstraction and detachment of clicky minimalist electronica should find that Remembranza supplies enough clicks and pings and muted thumps to stand in for that style, while it also provides the emotional backdrop of a film score or well-orchestrated pop music. I'd love to hear this record with some sultry, bluesy vocals over it. As is, it's still a wonderful piece of deep listening mood music just waiting for a film to be shot to go with it.

samples:

• Recuerdos
• Rios
• Camino