I happened across this album by chance, because I was interested in using one of the tracks - Shadow - in a DJ mix. I'd never heard of Mind Over Midi before now, and although they've released several albums they seem like yet another techno group who haven't made their way onto the blogosphere circuit, despite the music here being just as good as much of the techno material the hipsters endlessly re-review. Project 3 is, by all accounts, their third album, from 2001. I haven't listened to anything else in their discography yet, so I've no idea how it fits into their artistic development or whatever.
I started off just listening to Shadow on Spotify, but the music that followed was so lush I decided to hear the whole thing. Shadow is really very good indeed, a piece of deep and mellow techno with a whispy female vocal, and it's quite rare to hear whispy female vocals in this genre. For a brief spell this felt like the best album of all time, with some really gorgeous pieces of melodic techno and some lovely ambient bits as well. Sadly, there are quite a few tracks that are dominated by unusually-delivered lyrical vocal performances, which weren't to my tastes. Granted it's very rare to hear this kind of thing on a techno record, so these tracks are "innovative" and "boundary-pushing", but they served only to wrench me out of the lovely ambient-dub-textural-techno headspace I'd drifted into.
Like a lot of the stuff in the post-Basic Channel/Pole techno realm, this album would be perfect to load up on the MP3 player on a foggy or snowy winter's morning, but it's not one for soundtracking your Sunday afternoon barbecue in July, and I'm more inclined to chop out the highlights for DJing shenanigans than return to this one as a long player any time soon.
Genre: DeepChord-doing-field-recordings-at-the-local-acoustic-open-mic-night techno.
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10.
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