[Aim]

Moomin made his debut on one of last year’s finest records, collaborating with Oskar Offermann on Hardmood/Joe McDaddy for the Aim label. For Spare Time, his first solo effort, he returns to Aim with two deep, low-key originals that are paired with a churning, spaced-out edit by Marvin Dash. Moomin works with a limited palette, exhausting his tracks’ elements via repetition. This is not a hugely unique characteristic, but his understanding of space is noteworthy. That repetition occurs in a palpable void rather than as tense loops, and so his closest analogues may be Christopher Rau or Omar-S in deep mode.

“Watermelon” is lazing, summertime material, stripped down to a Chicagoan rhythm and a faintly twinkling synth pattern. Midway through, the bass line evolves into a charming but weighty motif, clearly influenced by classic soul records. The similarly unhurried “Morning Mist” is largely based around a recurring chords-and-subs arrangement. Its rhythm is a gently old-school and surefooted undercurrent to the track’s dominant synthesizer cushion. Finally, Marvin Dash turns in a stunner of an edit, somehow finding an excess of dark trippiness in “Watermelon,” though some of its elements are not present in the original. He slows the tempo, moving taut, crackling atmospherics around minute bits of vocal, subtly altering the arrangement along the way. Think of the first two tracks on Actress’ Splazsh or a housier rendition of Andy Stott’s Passed Me By and you’re not far off. The heady, astral result makes Spare Time a considerably more valuable package, catering to the home listener and DJ alike.