Mica Levi & Oliver Coates - Remain Calm (2016)

Totally absorbing session between longtime spars Mica Levi and Oliver Coates, spawned from an impromptu NTS radio session in 2014 where they decided to hear what happens when they fused Mica’s electronics with fragments of Coates’ classical compositions.

The results are really quite incredible, truly surpassing the sum of their parts to instinctively feel out an earthbound but sky-gazing sound peppered with all the emotive ambiguity, strange infidelities and instrumental dexterity that you’d be warranted in expecting from this duo.

In just under half an hour they sashay thru thirteen succinct vignettes, perfusing Mica’s bass bumps and diaphanous atmospheres with Coates’ spectral, plasmic string gestures with a tactile looseness that allow forms to emerge on their own terms, much in the same, mosaic manner as Mica’s Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill mixtape.

Ultimately it’s neither one thing nor another, existing in an ephemeral, quantum flux between electromagnetic traces of grime, noise, knackered techno and ambient classical music with the dreamiest sense of deferred, suspended gratification.