There is as much to be learned from plateaus as there is from peaks. While it is in our nature to mine the milestones for meaning, they would not exist without the fertile grounds of stillness that precede them. This past winter, after spending nearly 2 years away from the craft, 25 year-old Brooklyn-based producer Miguel Lorenzo came in from the cold and began making music again. Over the course of six weeks he mined the grooves of his record collection for sounds and samples to transform into quick and dirty dance cuts. Pulling from the styles of IDM, dub techno and outsider house, Lorenzo has imbued these audio artifacts with new life and compiled them onto a pair of EPs, fittingly titled "Liminal Green" and "Liminal Red". Due for independent release this Fall, the projects are the first under Lorenzo's MIGUELNOTTHESINGER (MNTS) alias, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the enigmatic R&B artist with whom he shares a first name.

Though starkly different in tone, "Liminal Green" and "Liminal Red" share a fascination with transitional spaces and intermediate zones. On Green the result is a set of convivial house tracks which ride the line between active and reflective mood setting. "Space module ii"'s heady tape hiss, liquid synth stabs and drubbing drums evoke Drexciyan images of deep sea space travel while the clanging hi-hats and throbbing bassline of EP opener "idontgooutanymore" is reminiscent of the half-awake buzz that hangs in the air of the night's last subway car home. Whereas Green frames these in-betweens as places of potential, the darker, more despondent Red conceives of them as purgatories, hazy mixes of turbulent energy and paranoid suspicions which offer little hope of escape. Its labyrinthine third track "silent conspiracy" feels like being stuck in an endless maze of dark hallways while concluding cut "gossip circles" brings to mind a claustrophobic sea of sweaty bodies and disorienting strobe lights.

The focus on the in-between extends beyond just how the music sounds. By building each track up from a sample, Lorenzo calls into question traditional notions of artistry as a purely solipsistic affair. These tracks are not the product of one person's vision but they aren't beholden to the collective either, rather they're a coalescence of the individual and the communal spheres which have elicited new meaning from existing sounds. The embrace of creativity's greyer areas can also be found in EPs' covers which were made by passing the project titles as prompts to Twitter user Adverb's Latent Vision AI, a generative art model trained on millions of public domain images. The results were distorted and drawn on by Lorenzo, similar to how he might loop and rework a sample.

- ND