Need a record to test your sound system, your friendships – and your perception?
Never have so many people released so much music. It has become easy to make – and release – music. MIDI generators, Splice sample libraries, loops, DAWs and AI prompting – all available on your phone now, with no studio or skills required – are everywhere, even on the charts.
At the same time, our shrinking attention spans and access to the entire history of music have made it so that often only the most heavily promoted, dopamine-triggering, retro-sounding meme hits reach a broad audience.
The antidote: Copenhagen’s Mike Sheridan could easily choose to drift along with that trend, but on his new record he has chosen to do precisely the opposite of both the mainstream and the “underground”: to make something slow, difficult, meticulous and present – completely stripped of trends, retro, meta-layers and irony.
Mike Sheridan? As a teenager, Mike emerged in the vacuum after Trentemøller went indie rock and Copenhagen’s post-electroclash club scene was turning into a druggy Boiler Room cliché. Mike deserted the dancefloor and started moving freely between indietronica-pop, jazz collaborations, installation music and soundtracks.
Now he has made a wonderful record – Touch – that is clearly born out of sheer pleasure for sound exploration – not in order to get a hit, fill a dancefloor or target a market niche. OK … perhaps the record can be used as a funding application – or as a strong argument for a Berlin Atonal booking …but fortunately “Touch” can do so much more than that.
I’ve lived with the record for a few days now. It’s like moving into a new apartment … you may meet the neighbours in a new way … if you turn it up. Played quietly, the record becomes more like a living ambient sculpture slowly unfolding.
My immediate thought: highly suitable for a horror film, an S&M ritual or simply a walk through the city to alter your perspective. It hums, crackles and hisses wonderfully!
I experience the record as a document of presence: no meta-layers, no irony, pure investigations of material that emit spicy frequency matter and lead to emotional experiences – if you’re open to them.
DARK AMBIENT? I get the sense that many people are rediscovering ambient works right now, as fatigue sets in with formulaic electronica and with the hunt for “the great song” dressed up in a thousand genre-mutated shit de jour disguises.
But ambient? Isn’t that fake meditation music, complete with bloated hi-fi-test synth pads for stoners, background music for Hollywood and quack clinics?
Yes and no…like so many other genres, ambient has an emotional and stylistic spectrum ranging from gentle sonic wallpaper to deep, demanding compositions that have more to do with industrial, classical music or dub than with new-age crap involving MIDI gong baths and birdsong.
When ambient works, it can colour a room and be used immersively, like lighting or perfume, but it can also function as a serious listening experience, like classical music or jazz – like back when the stereo system was the most sophisticated piece of technology in the home, and you arranged the furniture between the speakers and simply stared into space while your body vibrated.
Mike has managed to create an album without melody, lyrics or beats. Here, the method is more about transformations of timbre that encourage the listener to co-create inside their own head – you unpack it yourself, without instructions. Good ambient can be both a present, substantial main course and a background perfume at low volume – and Touch excels in both positions.
This is not an easy record. There is no Brian Eno fluff here. It tastes more like sinister drone from Coil, Tibetan ritual music, Peter Leander, Sunn O))) without the guitars, gentle dynamic Merzbow or early Murcof before the crystalline piano took over.
Despite its apparently raw and organic output, the record is luxuriously mastered and cut by Berlin master Rashad Becker, and you quickly forget the individual ingredients: rubbing the rare Cristal Baschet sound sculpture – a kind of metal-and-water organ – the muttering of the EMS-style modular synth, the effects chains – all the sources blend into one – into Pro Tools with no Ableton gymnastics involved.
It is almost impossible to distinguish what is live sound, what is processing and what is Mac – resulting in a fitting soundtrack for a raw report from a world on fire … or whatever you happen to associate between the speakers.
THE OBJECT: The Touch vinyl is a beautiful object, with handsome, austere Klein-blue artwork by Andreas Korsgaard Rasmussen, printed in two colours – heavy vinyl, a beautifully produced sleeve, two versions with only 150 copies of each … straight into the vault. Plus: there is also a DJ slipmat!
I can recommend seeing Sheridan live. He controls every detail and delivers an enveloping, unusual listening experience that forces you to be present in your body – without dancing.
I’m soon going to open a DJ set with this record. It’s perfect for resetting the room, checking the sound system and clearing the air.
The big question after such an uncompromising release is:
Where does Mike go from here?
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