Review - Come Here When You Sleepwalk

With a reputation built upon underground hip-hop, Mush Records has made a name as a boutique dedicated to progressive, quality-oriented beat music. Thus, the emergence of this delicate flower of a record on this label is a bit surprising. The solitary creation of Australian Mark Mitchell, Clue to Kalo merges dream-pop atmospherics with laptop digitalia, and the results are impressive, if not somewhat disorienting. Typically, the gauzier facets of indie pop tend to be handled by guys with overeffected guitars. To have the same ethereal grace generated by "cold" synth patterns and blip-hop beats requires a readjustment of expectations. Sure, we've all heard new age and Eno-style ambient before, and if Mitchell would have created monochromatic lusciousness, "Come Here When You Sleepwalk" could easily be classified as such. Yet CTK is a different mission and Mitchell piles track upon disjointed track of synthetic noodlings, corrupted samples and arrhythmic beats, every now and then dressing it up with a bit of a whispered vocal line. Sounds obnoxious, but it's not. The sheer haziness of it all makes the overall effect deceptively pleasant. While most bedroom auteurs seem to be interested in purging their souls or pushing the envelope, Mitchell, with his Clue To Kalo project, seems to have done both.