Mux Mool, Planet High School
Featured Album
Tightening the reins
On 2010′s Skulltaste, his first album for Ghostly International as Mux Mool, Minneapolis-gone-to-Brooklyn downtempo producer Brian Lindgren created IDM-tinged, electro-flecked tracks that roamed around the sound-field. You could hear everything from Planet Mu (the swampy bass and tinny breaks of “Breakfast Enthusiast”) to Mo’ Wax (“Morning Strut”) in its DNA, but on Planet High School, Lindgren’s tightened the reins – his tempos are generally meditative and his compositions are less meandering. Yet the music traverses lines as easily as ever: “Palace Chalice” is the kind of track you might have ripped from that pile of mostly-useless trip-hop comps back when you got your first CD burner, but the cooled-down Jan Hammer synths also let you get away with calling it “Balearic.” Those synths are key here: Lindgren makes them sing, be they running in soft-focus on “Ruin Everything” (think Black Moth Super Rainbow at their cloudiest) or attacking like funk guitars on “Hand on the Scantron.”
