Uni Umit

Uni Umit appeared amidst a productive flourish from Jan St. Werner – alongside this album was another Lithops set, Didot; his duo with Andi Toma, Mouse On Mars, had recently released three excellent albums, Autoditacker, Glam, and Instrumentals, the latter two on their new label Sonig; another duo, Microstoria, with Markus Popp of Oval, had convened the collaborative/remix album Reprovisers. But Uni Umit doesn’t suffer from any loss of focus. It’s one of Werner’s most seductive albums, this set of untitled, arcane structures for muted, meandering ‘insect electronics’. At times, the tone of the material reminds of Hugh Davies’s self-invented instruments for springs and electronics, shozygs. At other points, it’s more elemental – imagine the scuttlings of exotic bugs in undergrowth, the mass movements of flocks of small birds through the air, or colour spirals refracting off waterways. It’s graciously slippery, and oddly ravishing.