Recently release digitally, this album created a little buzz after getting praise from Pitchfork and The Wire. »Sampling gamelan, marimba, mbira, and other idiophones, Friedman summons a microtonal riot of weightless pings that disorients and delights in equal measure.«

»METLASR« is an album for microtonal idiophones and modular synthesizer by composer/producer Tyler Friedman for Radicant_Editions.

Drawing on the legacies of downtown minimalism, »METLASR« connects avant-garde composition, aspects of global traditional musics and advanced synthesizer technique into an ambitious and singular hybrid. Animated by generative modular sequencing and grounded by undulating bass, the album focuses on an endless cascade of pirouetting geometric melodics, which are spread across a spectrally fused ensemble of crystalline FM and sampled pitched percussion – specifically gamelan orchestra, marimba, mbira, vibraphone and tingklik. The assemblage of voices interlace in fractal mirrors, aggregating into pointillist harmonizations heightened by multiple layers of dub processing. The use of alternative tunings — primarily 24-note per octave just intonation — infuses the poly-modal progressions with lush radiance, staging tension between the strange and the beautiful through neon inflections of subtle dissonance.