Invisible Architecture #3: Microstoria

From its formalist fancies to its tendency to invoke the old "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" cliché even more than most genres, electronic music has long been locked in a ghostly dance with the architectural impulse. Both strain against connotations of cold design and clinical execution, and both negotiate a push-pull relationship between the confines of process and theoretical aims couched in limitless ideals. As evidenced by the talk burbling around designs for the World Trade Center site, the discipline of architecture is also a dialogue, a series of impressionable answers to questions never resolved. In that way, Microstoria's Invisible Architecture #3 works as the musical equivalent of a drafting-board dream. A duo that packs about as much star power as computer music has to offer, Microstoria makes sounds split between its members' calling cards: the skipping wooziness of Oval maestro Markus Popp, and the bouncy lurch of Mouse On Mars' Jan St. Werner. Invisible Architecture #3 swirls the template into a plaintive ambient smear, but it's just as rich with space. "Performal" starts off with a series of ticks and flickers set atop an ethereal hum, fidgeting like hard-drive architecture settling into itself on a quiet night. From there, the disc–;culled from a live set in Belgium in 2000–circles around similar themes, making a subtle show of the outsized sway of minor differences. "Glocky Bit" reaches for metallic pings and refracted whistles reminiscent of Mouse On Mars, while "Artik" retools the processed feedback shards heard on recent Oval albums. In pieces, Invisible Architecture #3 delves deep into a sound-field developed from geology and concrete; as a whole, the disc glides over the top of a complex structure that's all the more commanding from a distance.