Vital Weekly on Form

Vital Weekly on Form

(…) Mo H. Zareei is from Iran but lives in Wellington, New Zealand and he calls his musical endeavour mHz. In the always somewhat convoluted language of the label, this album is an exploration of a materially constrained sound source through the lens of the primary elements of formal order: unity, variety and harmony. The raw material in this series is created through a single generative engine comprised of eight identical oscillators. Throughout the album, this material is reconfigured using distinct compositional strategies involving varying degrees of control, freedom, chance and will.

mHz uses custom-built software and hardware, I think, mostly with max/MSP, which he then structures using, perhaps, something like Ableton Live. Like with various of the previous releases on Kasuga Records, there is the always strict, rigid 4/4 bass beat created from sine waves, and hiss and click provide the melodic top. Think Pan Sonic meets Alva Noto, Goem meeting Ryoji Ikeda and you get part of the picture. In Form D there is even a more formal synthesizer sound bouncing along with the beat and it is the album’s most straightforward approach to dance music.

What I particularly liked about this that there are four pieces which can be seen as originals and then from each of these four, mHz created a remix of some sort, reshaping some of the elements, making it quite a different song altogether, and yet recognizable when compared to the original. I can see how his mission statement works here. This is another fine mark of what I think could be a comeback of the whole clicks ‘n cuts movement.

— Frans de Waard via Vital Weekly