Formations

With a back-story that includes growing up surrounded by the likes of the Sex Pistols, Ian Dury, and Thin Lizzy in her parents' Covent Garden recording studio, living in over 15 different cities, and ultimately trading in her vocation as a documentary filmmaker for a career as a twinkly laptop horticulturist, 24-year-old Londoner Mileece is an anomaly among laptop artists. She makes music like it, too. The granddaughter of proto-computer musician Max Matthews programmed the entirety of Formations using a complex, syntactical computer program called Super Collider. Inspired by the biological aspects of plant growth and cell regeneration, Mileece's sound is a complex array of bell tones that pile on top of each other like a generative floral print before either fading away or peeling off into new branches. Tonally, the differences between the album's five pieces are negligible, but Mileece's brief intersections of glitch elements, cello, and voice help maintain the spell. Elegant, human, and completely hypnotic, Formations is an astoundingly beautiful debut, and possibly the last word on "organic" laptop composition.