Robert Merlak

Tip! An essential repress of the monumental 2020 album. Finomehanika was Rijeka-based Robert Merlak's first solo release in two decades since "Albumski" on pioneering avant-garde techno label Phthalo which put him on the map next to fellow artists as diverse as Dntel, Daedelus and James 'V/Vm' Kirby.

Merging piano and field recordings, Merlak moves between musique concrete, ambient, and neo classical, crafting great layers of depth and ambience combining the frayed melancholia of Vladislav Delay's Multila with the strangely real-sounding yet otherworldly mechanics of Autechre during their Confield years. All the while sounds from the natural world prevent us from drifting too far into the abstract, keeping us grounded in a fragmented, confusing but familiar environment. What makes Finomehanika all the more impressive is that it was produced in the early 2000s pre-broadband-Internet, post-war Croatia with sparse equipment.

The album features the artist's brother Miro, better known for his releases as Qwerty. The sleeve design was commissioned from Michael Tan known for his previous work with artists such as Blanck Mass and Dopplereffekt.