ndreas Tilliander, the Swedish gentleman behind Mokira, is many things to many people. He’s a member of Minimalistic Sweden, a Mille Plateaux recording artist, a vegan, and a pioneer in the IDM genre. I’ve even seen him pose how-to questions in electronic music forums, giving rise to the rumor that he is also, in fact, a human being.

He has worked in a number of genres, using a variety of monikers, and that’s nothing new in the world of electronic music. What was striking and new about his work was his 2001 album Cliphop, under the Mokira pseudonym. This blended diced rap vocal samples, magnificent pads, and modulated breaks into something that for a brief moment was original before everyone copied his style and his music and pasted both all over the internet. And no, it didn’t sound like Prefuse. What Andreas seemed to do better than anyone was rhythm: IDM is no stranger to off-the-wall breaks (I’ve often wished the acronym stood for Intelligent Drum Machines, but I’m no Will Safire), but Tilliander did something with rhythm that made his tracks instantly catchy, memorable and brilliant.

Unfortunately he seems to know as well as anyone that to release another album in the style of Cliphop would be redundant. He has pulled a Pole – he’s abandoned the style that made him quasi-famous, tried to break into a new genre (using similar equipment), and failed. According to Type’s website, this album, Album, is supposed to be post-rock. To my ears, it simply sounds like grainy, muddy ambient music and experiments in granular synthesis. The tracks are long and evolve slowly, and while some of the synth- and sample-tones sound like typical Tilliander, others seem to have been layered in an attempt to sound like My Bleedin’ Valentine. It’s this:

+++++++++++long pasted water tones, clouds ++++++++++
+++++++four colors of air++++++++repressed anger++____
________nostalgia++++++++=======irrelevance, the sound
of muffled crying from next door (+) (+) (+) ++++++++++++
+++++++short moving tones++++++something sung_______
+++++++++++++++++++++it was once a guitar**********
+then the evening+++++++++ and the longer night+++++++

But he just can’t pull it off. The music is slow and musty, but it doesn’t entice you in the way that shoegazer or post-rock music does. It just sounds like an ambient album. It has it’s moments, and there are some interestingly crusty sounds. But here’s the yardstick I use: what if Pole had released his most recent album, his step in a new direction, before his first album, the one that made him famous? Would indie reviewers have fallen all over themselves to sing (or awkwardly rap, like Fat Jon) his praises? No, they would’ve ignored it. Same thing with this album. If Tilliander had released this disc before he released Cliphop, it would have evaporated. No one would’ve called it post-rock, it would just be more tracker music from a white dude. Plenty where that came from.

If this is a new beginning for Tilliander, perhaps he will follow it up with a better album in a year or two, in a similar style. He hasn’t lost his ability to make interesting sounds. But he (like Pole, I suspect) has felt like he’s become stuck in a rut. Also, he must feel that his signature style has been aped too often in the hyperdecadent bit torrent that is the internet. So he’s trying to start fresh. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and see what he comes up with next time. In the meantime, pass the Cliphop. Or better yet, Ljud.