- Moiré steps away from the knackered house to make a truly beautiful downtempo record.
- On the second track of Moiré's fourth album, Circuits, the UK producer's music blooms into full colour for the first time. A plangent synth melody drifts to the ground like a flowing tapestry, covering everything with a depth of feeling that was always at arm's-length before. Every few bars, glorious strings swell over top a pitter-patter beat that inches forward gracefully. It's the moment that the LP becomes different from any of Moiré's previous albums—which were greyscale, sluggish but strangely funky—and turns into his best, most elegant music yet.
Circuits is an intentional step away from the Actress-indebted techno and house Moiré used to make. He says goodbye to that sound on the opener, "Circuit 1," whose wounded walk and pondering horn sounds bear more than a little resemblance to classic Kassem Mosse. From there, though, it's all chiffon synths and ambling drums. Even "Circuit 15," with its shimmering house stabs, moves in and out focus constantly, never quite settling into the place you think its mournful melody would take it. So maybe he's still keeping us at arm's length, just a little bit.
Moiré sleepwalks through variations of house and downtempo with a comfortable but experimental bent that exemplifies the Avenue 66 label (part of the same Oliver Bristow-run family that includes Absurd and Acid Test). The drums on "Circuit 4," metallic and sharp, could be literal pots and pans—lifelike samples that lend the percussion an unusual emotional weight. You can hear this on "Circuit 7," too, which sounds forlorn until it bursts into three-dimensionality. And "Circuit 8" features another funereal refrain, textures blurry like tears smudging eyeliner.
Even Moiré's tracks with vocals could feel obtuse and abstract in the past, from the clipped syllables of his still-sterling debut single "Lose It" to his hip-house inspired moments (imagine Galcher Lustwerk on a flickering TV channel). Circuits, with its meandering pace and sprawling approach, isn't necessarily any more open, but the production is tighter, the melodies stronger. It's as if letting go of the paranoid techno grid of past work opened up new possibilities, not outside of dance music but instead in its in-between crevices. So you get the ghost of techno, the spirit of Chicago and something brand new as well. I've always felt like Moiré, while greatly talented, has lived in the shadow of the artists he resembled. On Circuits, he reaches a rarefied air occupied by the only the finest and most influential of ambient techno artists.
Tracklist01. Circuit 1
02. Circuit 2
03. Circuit 15
04. Circuit 16
05. Circuit 4
06. Circuit 8
07. Circuit 7
08. Circuit 17