"For those willing to surrender to its unhurried pace, From The Toolkit Of Lovers is a richly rewarding journey into the strange spaces between minimal house, dub techno and ambient."
The old virtue of patience. It doesn’t often get its time in the spotlight, especially in an era of 2 minute hooky tracks designed for rapid consumption and impounding in the rubbish skip of lazy slop. From The Toolkit Of Lovers, a nearly 2-hour smorgasbord of minimal goodness, feels like it takes personal offence to this trend and gives poor, neglected patience its long overdue stint in the sun.
There are few producers who have mastered the art of doing so much with so little quite like Brian Leeds. Across his various aliases, most notably Huerco S. and Loidis, the Kansas-born producer has spent something like fifteen years exploring those little universes of texture, space and repetition, producing music that feels properly intricate and understated. Music that snatches attention even if it’s listening to one delayed synth chord bouncing in microscopically varying ways through your speakers. His work as Loidis, in particular, has become a vehicle for a wonderfully idiosyncratic strain of dubby, minimal house, where the smallest tweaks can transform the character of a track.
Now, following 2024’s One Day, Leeds returns to Incienso with From The Toolkit Of Lovers, a sprawling, twelve-track, 110-minute triple LP recorded over the summer of 2025. This feels like something of a distillation of the techniques and ideas accumulated across his various projects. A patient (there’s that word again), unhurried exploration of what can be achieved with what is actually quite a restrained artist’s palette of sounds. And while the album’s considerable runtime might raise a few eyebrows, there’s something a bit wonderful about the confidence with which Leeds allows the tunes to unfold. Why not bask in those soundwaves a bit when the water’s this inviting?
Opener TT Stunt offers a fitting introduction. A hesitant rattle of toms here, some distant female vocals there, all gradually giving way to warm, dubby chords, shuffling percussion and a gently insistent kick. As the track develops, subtle waves of sub lend that warm, immersive depth, while little synth stabs and rising textures are introduced almost imperceptibly. It’s a bubbling pot of musical ingredients, Leeds deftly adding and removing elements until what initially feels glitchy and restless settles into something remarkably smooth. Absolutely cooking on gas with finely-tuned seasoning.
On A Fine Line, crunchy, distorted percs and crisp closed hats provide the framework for colourful, swinging synths and playful little sine-wave melodies. Think Barker’s weightless melodic sensibility weaving around the twitching minimalism of Rhadoo. The real achievement is the balance though. Despite the sheer number of elements weaving in and out of the arrangement, nothing feels overcrowded. The sub has ample room to groove, the melodies occupy their little pockets of space, and even when the kick disappears entirely, the momentum is sustained by a rhythmic interplay of the synthesizers. Deft.
It’s a skill shown off with even more swagger on Towlift, where a relatively straightforward chord progression provides the foundation for an impossibly intricate web of percussion, delayed synths and reverberant textures. The kind of arrangement that would give you a headache to look at, but sounds gloriously harmonious. Elements bounce around the stereo field, reflecting and refracting into one another, while more of those distorted midrange bits jostle against softer, more expansive pads. Organised chaos of the highest order. Then for a trick that’s pulled, again, more than once, as above this seething mass a single hat pulls the whole lot into an irresistible, cohesive groove.
Dry Your Eyes, feels like a slightly more restrained affair. Moodily shuffling hats, little synthetic textures and a bowlful of snaps, crackles and pops gradually make way for some of the most beautiful pads on the record. These great, pillowy clouds of sound drift across the arrangement, sounding quite as deep as they do because of the time it takes to reach them.
On Possession Centre we get something a touch different. Percs distorted into what’s almost like hazy field recording, rattles and quiet crashes, it’s the ambient clatter of a kitchen aboard some space-bound cruise liner. There’s always a suggestion that a great, thumping four-to-the-floor kick might be about to arrive. Ah, but it never does. Teased instead with a distant, almost dampened kick instead Leeds continues to eke out the track’s rhythmic possibilities.
The twelve-minute Horse On Wheels combines swinging synth stabs, an unusually melodic bassline and starry-eyed pads, and it’s very lovely, particularly when the kick drops away and the synthesizers spiral upwards into a technicolour, chrome-burnished vortex. Running Rich, is then another ten-minute excursion built around a playful bassline, popping toms, drifting pads and a gradually accumulating percussion arrangement.
The lengths of the tracks really begin to make sense at this point. By stretching his compositions as so many minimal producers do, it’s so easy to be drawn into the soundscape, and to take note of each obsessive detail. When a delayed chord finally echoes around the cavern of your skull, or a crisp hi-hat suddenly establishes a new rhythmic emphasis, it’s a reward for those who stick with the record and give it their full attention.
Council Grove offers a one of the particularly weightless combinations of fluttering pads, clicking percussion and constantly shifting synth stabs, while Shopgirl Keepsake ventures into stranger territory, its heavily warped, metallic textures and distorted, subterranean sounds eventually coalescing around a hypnotic vocal sample and a belated kick. Just more bubbly, dubby goodness to sink into. What’s nice about a listen-through to From The Toolkit Of Lovers is that after so much of it, you kind of start to feel like you’ve heard it all now. But then Leeds will do something with essentially the same ingredients that can still surprise and delight you.
It’s Copy Plot where, for me, I really had that sensation and for me, means that the track emerges as one of the record’s real highlights. Warm, VHS-hazed pads drift above a warpy little bassline, and we get distant metallic synths and bouncing delays to create that always satisfying sense of bottomless depth. A high sustained droney thing introduces another layer of tension, while a fleeting vocal passage lends a little human soul to the otherwise synthetic surroundings. Intoxicating and transporting.
The Lowest Word is a deeply dubby, effortlessly finger-flicking excursion through groove , that cavernous sub-bass and softly delayed chords doing the business, while I Would Be Glad On It offers a lovely conclusion. We get all the usual distorted low frequencies and crisp, glitching percussion, but delicate chord stabs and breathy, melodic pads gradually emerge to lend a wistfully nostalgic sensation to the closing minutes. Who knew clicks and pops could provide the fizz for such warm emotion.
Ultimately, From The Toolkit Of Lovers is like the more chilled younger brother of One Day. It’s (just) a little less club centric, but those long, long arrangements and this penchant for dropping in hats at just the right moment for that release of tension, I could listen to that all day. The kind of thing to get beard-stroking minimal fans frothing.
But seriously, the production is consistently exquisite, the rhythmic arrangements frequently mind-bending, as far as an ode to attention to detail goes, this is a really good one. For those willing to surrender to its unhurried pace, From The Toolkit Of Lovers is a richly rewarding journey into the strange spaces between minimal house, dub techno and ambient.
‘From The Toolkif Of Lovers’ is out 23 October via Incienso. Listen to and buy vinyl from Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
1. TT Stunt
2. A Fine Line
3. Towlift
4. Dry Your Eyes
5. Possession Centre
6. Horse On Wheels
7. Running Rich
8. Council Grove
9. Shopgirl Keepsake
10. Copy Plot
11. The Lowest Word
12. I Would Be Glad On It