Microfibers by Microfibers

Sometimes it’s the familiar things that get you. Microfibers, the self-titled debut release by visual artists and musical collaborators Jonny Campolo, Keegan Monaghan, and Eugene Wasserman, makes the everyday strange — conjuring up an intensity that belies its unassuming title, surfing the tension between the warmth of its communal effort and cool-to-the-touch presentation.

Microfibers is an otherworldly transmission from known territory. Recorded at Brooklyn’s totemic BC Studios — helmed by the same Martin Bisi who has presided over a host of avant classics in Gowanus since the 80s — the two-track album is mere degrees of separation from its influence. BC Studios was built with Brian Eno to make Ambient 4: On Land (1982), an out-there favorite at the heart of Microfibers’ inspirational cosmos. Its core and peripheral contributors are now standbys of the greater New York art and art-adjacent music scenes, drawing from a similar set of influences spanning film music, ambient, and free-improvisational styles.

Familiarities aside, there’s nothing quite like Microfibers. It bathes in the uncanny, a subtle and all-the-more destabilizing twist on the normal. As with its ambient and minimalist forebears, the album’s twin tracks consciously create a space rather than blending into the background — an oblique pushback to the anesthetizing playlist ambient that soundtracks our outer lives. While Microfibers can resemble soundtrack music in its patience, it is more filmic than a typical score would allow, with its own suggestive narrative and heady atmosphere. Tension and release, dissonance and consonance, and attack and sustain all shed their expected expressive functions. The mood is resolutely ambivalent, spaciously claustrophobic, serenely tense.

Clocking in at just over 18 minutes, “Glass of Water” creeps in on a hesitant harp arpeggio from Shelley Burgon, patiently unfolding alongside increasingly insistent background thrums and hits. The meditative quality of the Italian avant-garde is present, but the sense of repose is slightly askew, as Burgon’s microtonal plucks fold in gently alongside blocks of sonic shade and grit. Meanwhile, “Tiers” smolders with overdubbed saxophones courtesy of fellow Soap Librarian Eve Essex, splitting the difference between haunted overdubs and lockdown dread. As bell-like sounds — evocative of a forgotten herd on a far-off knoll — rise in the mix, metal-splinterings from a prepared piano jar the listener from their reverie.

This precise yet irresolute quality extends to the LP itself, which defies conventions by eschewing the typical A/B binary — each side presenting as its own first half. Similarly, the album cover does not adhere to the title-and-credits division of labor one might expect, but gives each side of the sleeve its own marquee spot with visual evocations of the track titles. Microfibers’ submerged intensity is matched by the striking insert – blood red bio-imagery suggestively sitting across from the guts of a prepared piano.

The recording process laid the groundwork for its multivalent listening experience. Beginning as motifs drawn from long improvisations, the music slowly grew into a hybrid improv-composition, as the trio overlaid responses to their initial gestures using guitar, synth, and a range of other instruments to dialogue with themselves asynchronously. The result is a controlled, musical aleatoric, evoking the wistful feeling of a chance encounter; a fleeting conversation with a passerby that lingers in the memory. Despite its connection to the canon of experimental minimalism, the album as a whole conjures a contemporary feeling, one that is fraught with both tension and possibility. Microfibers contains a lot, but conceals as much as it reveals, inviting you to dwell in its liminality a little longer.

Microfibers releases on Friday, May 9, 2025 on Soap Library in vinyl LP, cassette, and digital formats, accompanied by a double-sided 20-strike matchbook. Jump in, the water’s warm – but so is the flame.

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