Midwinter Blues

Colab‘s “Midwinter” is posted as a work-in-progress teaser from a forthcoming album, Fat Tuesday. Judging by that title, he has a little over a month to go. The track is a solid little piece, a mix of minimal-techno rhythmic play and industrial mecha-vocalization. The percussion is pointillist and vibrant, if icily so. The pings ricochet in slow motion and bound about in patterns that are less succinct than they might at first seem. The vocal, similarly, is less welcoming than is initially suggested; it remains just out of the reach of comprehensibility. As “Midwinter” progresses, an occasional piano figure nudges the track toward downtempo chaos, at time sounding like something else entirely is leaking in from a neighboring studio. It’s one more element of artfully implemented misdirection.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/colab. More from Colab, aka Mikael Hansson of Toronto, Canada, at twitter.com/colab_toronto and at his ccmixter.org page.