From Vienna comes one Davor Mikan, of whom I never heard, ‘where he creates music about failure, beauty, lust and delusion in the context of psychoacoustic effects and in a personal sense (self-delusion)’, as it is said on the blurb. He is using generative graphic tools together with granular synthesis to transform sound. Whatever that may mean, even when I think he uses sound software to transform work generated with software that is in general used for design. Which is not a new thing, as some programs do allow you to open a text or image file and then it will ‘read’ as music. Judging by the same what harsh, crude and loud music Mikan produces on ‘Täuschung’ this is the case here (unless he uses the ‘pencil’ in the audio software program to re-draw sound curves, which might give a similar effect). Thirty one tracks, spanning just over thirty seven minutes means that we are dealing with short pieces here. Very short but partly loud pieces. I don’t recall such a noise based release on Cronica, which I think is a good move. Noise, certainly when it’s done well, is the new main thing. Be it the crude, Merzbowian blasts of noise, the lo-fi noise of New America, the end of soft glitch seems imminent. See last week’s Josh Russell’s release and this week it’s Mikan. Maybe the pieces could move away from the sketch like character and grow into something more composed like, but otherwise this is a most promising start. (FdW)