Rajko Müller's unique gift as a producer is his sense of play. His best tracks are the sonic equivalent of page-turners, constantly making room for new sounds, melodies, and rhythmic half-thoughts, constantly in motion without ever sounding like they made a radical departure. When they work, it's in subtle ways: All their parts sound like they belong even when their entrances feel unexpected. Müller tends to stick to house music's basic pattern of one bass-drum thunk every beat and one snare every other, which is another reason it never seems like he's up to anything overtly unusual: There's always a simple rhythm to tie you down if the other ones-- the sneaky, evaporating ones-- don't. In between the beats are sweet, detuned melodies, computer wheezes, and flashes of dissonance. That his experiments don't always work makes me like him more-- it seems like he'd rather hear a track fall short than bend to the rules.
Müller's last full-length as Isolée, 2005's We Are Monster, sounded like a cluttered dollhouse, micro in scale but overflowing with ornaments. It's still an amazing album for listeners who'd prefer a parade of tiny surprises to a few skullcrushing ones, and probably my favorite piece of legitimate dance music to crossover to an indie audience in the past several years. Since then, he's released a few singles and EPs, and an early works collection called Western Store-- basically, a total of maybe nine or 10 new tracks over the past six years.
For people who've followed him-- through the "Albacares" single, "October"/"Nightingale", and "The Fantastic Researches of Yushin Maru"-- the feel of Well Spent Youth will be familiar. It's less cheerful than We Are Monster, still soft but more dissonant and evasive, and significantly more invested in that recurring fascination of contemporary techno, the squelchy noise.
Its most unusual tracks--"Going Nowhere" and "Transmission"-- are so littered with sound that they feel almost random, and while Müller manages to tie them together for a few seconds at a time, the coherence is mostly exciting because of these wild, slippery moments on either end where the music appears to come in and out of focus. He reprises melodic and rhythmic ideas, but to my ears the tracks themselves are never cyclical-- it's flux-music, and music that sounds better when you're willing to be patient with it than when you're not.
In other places, he lapses into moody, low-key house, and in a couple of instances-- "Thirteen Times an Hour" and "Taktell"-- revisits the bright slow-plays that marked We Are Monster. While this record doesn't feel as spirited as his last full-length, I think it's also a different album with different aims. I'd imagine Isolée fans who thought the pretty, toy-like tracks on We Are Monster bordered on twee will prefer the open-ended and more mysterious sound of Well Spent Youth.
The album is the first full-length on Pampa Records, a new label run by the prankish and wonderful DJ Koze (about whom I have a lot of nice things to say, almost all of which can be summed up in a "commercial" he recently made for the music tech company Native Instruments). The label that put out We Are Monster, Playhouse, is still around but has receded into a happy routine. At this point, Müller's music isn't really part of a conversation about the future of dance music. "Microhouse"-- what We Are Monster was classified as-- is an old-fashioned term.
And I doubt Müller cares. He's a venerated producer with a style that people can probably recognize but nobody can imitate well. Hearing him come off a fairly quiet six years with something that doesn't sound at all anxious about being an Isolée album is a show of confidence-- warranted, of course.
