Haven't you heard of Mikey Young before? Don’t worry, most of the people haven’t. There’s an underground scene anywhere, and Australia is no exception. That is where Mikey seems to rule. He’s no only a member of numerous bands not even many in Australia have heard of, like Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression Ring but seems to have gained quite a reputation as an engineer and a producer. That got the attention of some labels on the other side of the globe, Chicago to be more precise. So Chicago’s Moniker Records came up with a somewhat quirky concept for an album series called Your Move, the Sytnthtastic Solo Series For Humans 8+. Behind the convoluted title lies a series of records, and it is started by no other than the hero of this story, Mikey Young, that has to be synth driven, but not limited to them, while the artwork has to be chess inspired. Great. So where were we?
With Mikey’s first volume in the series ‘aptly’ titled Your Move Vol.1. And it is a good one. Mikey obviously has a lot of music knowledge in him and he’s putting it in front of us on this one. What we get is a set of four relatively ‘short’ pieces, if yo consider that two of them are over seven minutes long, but then the closer, Enigmatic Cosmic Enforcer gets us over the 20-minute mark! And all of them take us into the realm of high-quality instrumental electro-pop! It is an utterly listenable combination akin to first two solo albums by Peter Baumann, one of the founders of Tangerine Dream (and those albums are worth looking into - Romance ’76 and Trans Harmonic Nights), Harmonia in its more melodic phase and modern day electro-pop purveyors like Hot Chip or Phoenix in its current shape or form.
Of course, Young cross-references a number of other musical names, taking the hot chip onto the autobahn here and there, but making it all oh, so easy on the ear. He does stick to the given guidelines since it is no problem for him to bring in some nice guitar parts (Cairns), as he seems to b e quite capable multi-instrumentalist. The mentioned elongated closer is a story in itself. Young turns out to be somebody who also has a precise sense of timing - at the moment you start getting the sense that a melody or a rhythm there might have run its course, they immediately are transformed into a new and fresh one, and you really get the sense that twenty minutes is exactly the time needed. Mikey Young makes a great introduction to a possibly intriguing series.
