Moiré - Shelter

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  • Since his debut last year, Moiré has lived in the shadow of Actress, the producer who signed him to Werkdiscs. They share a bleary-eyed outlook on electronic music, preferring the same fuzzy filters and greyscale palette, but where Actress unspools these elements into avant-garde soundscapes, Moiré bundles them into dance tracks. After two strong EPs of fogged-up techno and house, Moiré returns with the more confident Shelter. Over the course of the record's 45 minutes, his formula—building club tunes with unstable frames and fuzzy borders—is in turns dazzling and tedious. Shelter offers its own drowsy take on house, where everything seems to slot into place almost accidentally. Sandwiched between kick drums that seem to drag their feet, ghostly voices and sharp fragments of sound turn into powerful melodic devices. On the ghostly opener "Attitude," which sounds like a dead ringer for Actress, the hi-hat and snare limp behind the beat. Moiré's personality comes out better elsewhere: the bassline on "No Gravity" shudders out in all directions like a low-frequency spore cloud, while "Stars" is disco made as stiff as plywood. Best of all is the one-two punch of "Elite" and "Hands On," where a sleepy slog transforms into piano house, but so ghostly and translucent it could only have come from Moiré's studio. When a more decisive kick drum comes to mark the transition into "Hands On," the simple shift is the LP's most exciting moment. But exciting is an odd word to use for for Shelter, which exists in a permanently overcast world. Of course, that's a key part of its atmosphere, but the novelty of hearing music this glum moulded into thumping 4/4 beats runs dry by around track seven. Add in a few moments that sound uncomfortably close to other artists (Galcher Lustwerk on "Dali House," anyone?) and you have a debut album that feels embryonic. Moiré clearly has a knack for building dance tracks out of strange and sometimes hallucinatory elements, but something about Shelter feels too hesitant. There's a near-perfect EP buried in here somewhere, and an inventive musical personality waiting to burst out, but Moiré's debut album does a better job of showcasing his potential than realizing it.
  • Tracklist
      01. Attitude 02. Dali House feat. Bones 03. Elite 04. Hands On 05. Infinity Shadow 06. No Gravity 07. Stars 08. Rings feat. Charlie Tappin 09. Mr Figure
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