The opening song on Moomin's debut album, The Story About You, said a lot about the Berlin house producer's approach. Its looped Rhodes keys were tentative and misty, and its drum programming skipped just so; the rhythm folded in the sloshing of waves and the looped cries of seagulls, sounds that imbued the song with an unmistakable pang of wistfulness, while the title, "Doobiest," scanned as slightly tongue in cheek. Did it refer to marijuana? Yacht rock? (From the sound of things, probably a little bit of each.)
The gulls reappear on "123," the opening track on A Minor Thought, his second LP for Hamburg's Smallville label. Once again, ruminative, dewy-eyed house music is the name of the game—one part Larry Heard, one part '70s tearjerker, and as richly textured as it gets. The drum machines are apple-crisp, and the song's main riff, a rising and falling horn loop, is as soft and rounded as sandstone. Over it all, a two-bar phrase of muted saxophone flutters like a tattered flag over a beach house that's been boarded up for winter. It is so him that it's almost self-parody. Moomin (Sebastian Genz) joined Smallville in 2010, four years into its run, but the way he has internalized the label's aesthetic might make him their most representative artist. Every one of his productions feels like a perfect distillation of an ideal type, and the same is true here, where each track renders the Smallville universe in miniature.
But nothing on A Minor Thought feels redundant. For one thing, these songs scratch a very particular emotional itch in extremely satisfying ways: They're both melancholy and zippy at the same time, downcast yet fleet of foot. Just listen to the way the piano in "Loop No. 1" tumbles up and down the scale, like a daydreamer with a restless leg. His songs are twee but never sappy, flirting with sentimentality while remaining at a winking remove from it. On top of all that, he's just very good at this sort of thing. Anyone could try to write a Moomin-style track by gathering up the requisite elements: the bone-dry 808, the airy keyboard loop, the layer of vinyl hiss. In fact, all of those sounds could probably be dialed up via sampler presets. But the way Moomin massages all his favored elements together is unusually artful.
How does he do it? Well, his drum loops collage together both patterns sourced from classic drum machines and hits sampled from physical kits. He's particularly fond of lone hi-hat hits swiped from old records and EQed until they sizzle in the mix, and he likes breaks that leave a little something extra in, like a scrap of crowd noise or a whisper or a laugh. In "Stotheh," some kind of voice lurks beneath the white-hot drums and lowing horns, and while it's impossible to tease out where it comes from or what it might be, it lends a crucial additional element of presence to the music. On "A Minor Thought" and "You Neva Know," the looped vocal samples are pushed up in the mix, but they remain largely indistinct and unintelligible, like human fingerprints smeared back toward pure abstraction.
Another of Moomin's tricks is to loop a chiming glissando, often a Rhodes electric piano or a xylophone, so that it seems to shimmer in midair. He favors background elements with soft, smooth attacks, so that they seem less played than simply willed into being, set free of the usual cause-and-effect relationship. He's a clever polyphonist, too: On "Chemistry," he begins with a backwards bell tone, adds wheezy organ, then paints on a high, sour ostinato that's not quite dissonant and not quite consonant, either. The bassline might or might not belong to the same key, and the same could be said of another synthesizer that he adds to the mix. The result is a cotton-candied swirl of tone that doesn't apply to the usual modal rules; severed from anything resembling a root note, the chords float in the air like colored mist, never touching the ground.
There is not, it is true, much variety here: All 11 tracks are paced somewhere between 120 and 125 beats per minute; all of them follow pitter-patter house beats; all of them use the same palette of cool jazz samples and Chicago house basslines and warm, watery keys. But if you're a fan of this kind of thing, A Minor Thought proves that sometimes variety isn't the most important quality in an album. Just like the sound of seagulls at the beach, sometimes familiarity offers its own rewards.
