Kwes’ music banks heavily on atmosphere. His debut EP, 2010’s No Need to Run, wrapped sketch-like beats in layers of synth swaddling and dub delay, and in 2012, his Meantime EP, the British musician’s breakthrough as a singer, arrived like a small, semi-precious object bundled between pillows of air. His debut album, ilp, presented an even blurrier kind of cherry-colored funk.
But the emphasis there remained on his songwriting and his voice, which snaked through all that digital processing like a serpent in wavy grass. Songs for Midi, on the other hand, is all instrumental, and its six tracks account for the most ethereal music the London producer has made yet. It sounds at once like a logical extension of his previous methods and a radical departure from them, as though he had leapfrogged whatever the natural next step after ilp might have been and leapt boldly into the unknown.
The record is meant as a tribute to his 2-year-old niece, Midori (the title’s a reference not to MIDI cables but to her nickname, Midi), and it feels appropriately childlike—full of playful melodies, music-box pings, and even sounds sampled from the toys of Kwes’ little cousin Connor. Those are presumably the playthings rattling about in the closing “Blox/Connor,” an unpredictable excursion through stuttering chord samples and skittering trap beats that begins whimsically enough but, like many a play date, finishes up in full-on meltdown mode.
Anyone who has ever spent much time with a toddler may recognize something of their psychology in these mercurial tracks, which don’t develop at all in the way you might expect. There’s something of SOPHIE’s balloon-squeak sonics in the EP’s hesitant plunks and zaps, but these songs bear little resemblance to the PC Music school of pop subversion. “Trike” begins with a lyrical plucked string fantasia reminiscent of Arthur Russell before pivoting to a buzzing synth melody that vibrates like a screen door; from there it just keeps moving outward, through squalls of pitch-bent synths, the feeble clicks of a dying wind-up toy, and finally, a climax of dub delay run amok. In the back of your mind, you keep expecting it to return to something resembling an A/B structure, and the song’s refusal to do so leaves you feeling slightly off balance. The other shoe never drops; instead, it morphs into a CGI butterfly and flutters away.
The whole EP is held together by the relatively consonant sounds of the opening “Midori,” in which softly pinwheeling arpeggios fuel a gently meandering path through woodwind-like synths, sparkling chimes, and the wow-and-flutter warble of disintegrating magnetic tape. It’s here, balancing the lyrical impulses of his previous records with the mind-bending sonics of his current interests, that Kwes’ adventurous vision shines brightest.
