METLASR is a hall of mirrors reflecting back on itself ad infinitum, liable to induce disorientation in anyone who wanders into its depths. Its spirals of percussion are often strikingly pretty, but the music is ultimately a triumph of the human desire to create objects that seem inhuman or transhuman: a musical Dyson sphere. This architectural colossus was composed, sequenced, and performed by Tyler Friedman, a one-time SoCal DIY kid now split between Venice and Berlin who’s spent the last 15 years making brainy, sequencer-heavy microtonal music with various degrees of fidelity to dance music—though nothing quite at this scale.
Friedman made these seven long tracks by feeding samples of various idiophones—Balinese tingklik and gamelan orchestra, marimba, mbira, vibraphone—into a custom-made generative sequencer. The spacing within the stereo field is masterful, and the recording fidelity is so clean that each percussive element is like an individually burnished mirror, gleaming with the cold beauty of polished metal. It’s fascinating to hear these metallic plings and wooden thunks twist themselves into fractals, to observe how percussion functions in a weightless environment. The density with which Friedman layers these sounds superficially brings to mind the German ambient techno great Pantha du Prince, but while that producer’s bell fantasias still adhered to basic dance-music pleasure principles, all Friedman retains from the club is a heartbeat-adjacent pulse and a sense of unstoppable forward momentum.
In place of drums is a constant floor of undulating synth bass, which sometimes twists itself into the treble range but mostly functions as the x-axis to the percussion’s y in the vast lattice structure that supports this music. When the bass drops out in the first few minutes of “Eleaphor,” you might notice something’s different but spend a few seconds figuring out what it is. METLASR is fiercely true to the few parameters it sets for itself, and Friedman only departs from the album’s core sound on “Jlaljar,” an assemblage of woodwinds that twists and turns like a multi-headed hydra looking for its prey. This Harryhausenesque creation eventually finds a sparring partner in a bassline that’s more serrated than the centering low-end thrum on the rest of the album; it’s the only track that can be really said to build, rather than proceeding from obscure interactions deep within Friedman’s tangle of software.
The elbow grease in METLASR’s making came more in preparing the tools involved than in the actual recording, which was mostly done in one-take, improvised sessions. Those who prefer an electronic-music puppetmaster’s presence to be more evident may find this music more akin to a well-calibrated Newton’s cradle than something that might easily slot alongside the conveyor-belt epics like Alcachofa and Vocalcity it structurally resembles. But after a while—likely sometime during the 26-minute “Narlotok,” or its sidelong vinyl equivalent, “Ghazelon”—the sense of being far from shore becomes its own intoxicant, and any apprehension about the album’s alien logic yields to an exhilarating surrender of control. There are few landmarks or directional guideposts within this sea of sound; you travel through it in a straight line, while the music sparkles all around you with no beginning or end in sight.
