Mike Honcho - Day to Day

 Released: May 1

Coming off his late last year release Glitter, Mike Honcho returns to Ingrown Records with a new album filled with off-kilter beats and synths, which is available on a double CD with the aforementioned previous album. Day to Day is a quite variable album that traverses a lot of different influences, most of which feels like a lucid blend of hip-hop and IDM in an experimental wrapping. Some of the tracks feature an impossibly heavy bass like the absolutely massive wall of bass that is “Dream” and the distorted madness that is “hype2.” The distortion on the latter makes its presence felt in the drums as well where it alternated between clean and crunchy. The follow up to “hype2” comes with a total vibe shift as we tread into dreamy and smooth downtempo beats that feel relaxed and chilled with an vibe of something like a vaporwave cabana if it were in the game Myst.

On track eight, “Nobody Comes Back/Void,” Mike does something interesting with the structure. Opening up as you might expect with a darkly bitcrushed and distorted beat, it slowly begins to morph. The drums fade out iece by piece and the pads hang long in the air. Those long hanging pads deteriorate slowly and give way to this intense and cyclical sounding drone with no accompaniment as it shifts spectrally for the rest of the track. It’s a bold strategy that does somewhat put the breaks on this before the album, but it actually works nicely as it dove tails back into the hyped up “GOBLIN MODE” with its snappy snare and wonky bass line. It made for quite a fun little moment of misdirection in this listening experience.