Motoko & Myers - Colocate (2021)

Motoko & Myers is the collaborative project of Bay Area-based duo Wonja Fairbrother and Daniel Letson. “Colocate” follows their 2018 debut release on the Open Hands Real Flames imprint, further developing their distinctive style which combines melodic, pop song structures with live improvisation and odd or no-meter approaches to rhythm and timing. It is a collection of bright, addictive listening, full of tracks that manage to feel at once hooky and aleatory, naive and rigorously arranged. Recorded and assembled sporadically over a period of several years, the album’s idiosyncratic palette was achieved through much technical and methodological eccentricity: “4-handed” collaborative keyboard playing; 12-bit sampling and archaic presets; field recordings of cicadas in Louisville, Kentucky and church bells in Freiburg im Breisgau. The album’s nine tracks exude a homespun quality that is rare to find in contemporary electronic music – hazy, warm, and disarmingly organic.