Everything about this new EP from Maxim Wolyzn is tentative; meditative; almost cautious. The slow, airy keys of opener ‘Stadt aus Sand’ accompanied by electronics that faintly whirr away in the background and later a kickdrum that stutters out a hollow-tipped pattern. The clinically detached bleeps that accompany the ambient synths, dubby chords and spare piano (played by Leonhard Kaufmann) on ‘Reconstruction Of A Heart’. The syrupy melody of coda ‘Another Time’, which sounds like it is about to burst into a full-blown jam at the moment it recedes into silence. The mood is spacious and unhurried. These are house music structures loosened up, slowed down and left to breathe.
At first glance, Wolzyn’s downtempo palette appears something of a curveball choice for Marionette, whose previous releases have been slightly terser, club-friendlier affairs from Laurine Frost and Deer. The German producer is perhaps best known for the dubby slow-mo house records he makes with Konrad Wehrmeister under the name of Günther Lause, and his approach is one that has little quibbles with departing from usual paradigms of functionality or dance-ability.
And yet, in the warm-wash ambience of ‘World From A Train Window’, where chimes flitter above an incessantly returning piano refrain or in the slowly expanding dub-echoes of the aforementioned ‘Reconstruction Of A Heart’, Wolyzn’s work exhibits a decentered and unplaceable aesthetic that sounds very much at home with the cosmopolitanism that Marionette has established. In its supple and beguiling tones, ‘Affirm, Deny, Reconcile’ presents itself as enjoyable, if un-showy, example of a continuing movement towards slower BPMs and looser ideas of what constitutes dance-music.
Affirm, Deny, Reconcile is out end of November 2015 on Marionette. Pick up a copy at Phonica.
TRACKLIST
A1. Stadt Aus Sand
A2. World From A Train Window
B1. Reconstruction Of A Heart
B2. Another Time
Discover more about Maxim Wolyzn and Marionette on Inverted Audio.