Hi, everyone. Jiffthony Splifftano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new miffle album, goodbye, world!

miffle is an artist based out of Warsaw, Poland who describes their music as electro-acoustic music made with tape loops. This is their debut album, and outside of that, I'm not sure there are many more bare facts that are necessary, which is fine because I feel like when it comes to music like this, sometimes the more mystery, the better. Drone, ambient music, electro-acoustic experiments, and tape music aren't always improved by an over-explanation of their process or what inspired it. I think of how polarizing William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops is due to what inspired it and what his process was on that project, which then becomes more of a conversation than the music itself. But I don't know, Basinski is also the closest thing tape music has to a genuine rock star, so maybe his approach is best.

With these genres though, the sounds are often so abstract and formalist that sometimes part of the fun can be just letting the audience immerse themselves in it and see what happens.

However, there are some scamp credits and background info to go off of:

"All sounds and instruments played, recorded, and mangled by miffle. All artwork by miffle. I'm dedicating this album to my dear friend C, who passed away on the seventh of April 2023. He was always super supportive and really enthusiastic to hear any music I made. I miss you so much."

And on the streaming platform profile photo I saw connected to this record, I noticed a couple of Death By Audio pedals. So no question, miffle is most definitely about that sound design life — if you're willing to drop the necessary cash to get one of those babies.

However, again, I will stress the real magic of this project is in the listening experience. Because from beginning to end, goodbye, world! is a nonstop array of relaxing but also evocative and otherworldly sounds. It's really one of the most perfect in the dark headphones listens I have had in a while...really, years. I would attribute a lot of that to this project just having a great balance. It's never so noisy and repetitive and abstract that it sounds boring or mind-numbing or impossible to wrap your head around, nor is it so directly musical or straightforwardly composed that it ever sounds completely normal.

Depending on the track here, you are going to get different palettes of strings, synths, and acoustic guitar. It sounds like almost each individual layer was captured to some kind of tape. Then from there, it is warped and altered to various degrees as they all play in unison, which I guess leads to different "effects," or ways in which the sounds on this project are altered. You are going to hear distortion, static, sometimes background hisses from the tape player; dips in speed and pitch in the audio, too. Occasionally, the volume falls in and out, either due to some degradation or the volume literally being altered.

Also, of course, you'll hear reversed sounds — different bits of instrumentation panned into each channel so they have a bit of a dueling effect — really all the types of weird sounds and glitches that you may already be familiar with if you've spent any amount of time listening to music on some cassette, which again has led to a lot of folktronic passages that sound familiar and alien at the same time.

Even though this record is as abstract as it is, I was surprised that I actually caught a number of what to me felt like musical and aesthetic highlights throughout. You have the quickly swelling sounds of field recordings, the bustle of crowds and traffic — what sounds like just being out and about while recording at the same time — which are set against these meditative synths and computing, little bleep-bloop notes on the track losing interest in the things you love.

There's also a truly beautiful stillness to the pensive guitar arpeggios and violin lines that you'll catch on the second track, "as the early birds rise". I also love the layers of high fidelity strings that seep in and slowly take over all of the mangled, warbly bits of tape guitar on the intro track, too. It's too gorgeous for words.

I'd also like to mention "cold concrete glows", which has this chilly, eerie atmosphere to it that makes me feel like I'm huddled inside of a 16-bit igloo, and I just want to hide in it forever.

I will emphasize, though, after pointing at all these tracks, this entire project isn't just a series of random ambient trinkets. They not only flow into each other really well and really seamlessly for the entire album, but some of miffle's production also results in these thick, powerful, noisy, larger-than-life drones, like the track "digital blizzard", which very much lives up to its name and description. The midpoint of "static snow" is also pretty all-encompassing.

Then we have the longest track on the record, "long walk home", which stands at eight minutes. It's this multi-phased monster that carries echoes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor with some of its folksy guitar and string passages at the start. But then it is eventually swallowed in this searing wall of bass and analog distortion that really crackles like a raging wildfire. Even as it gets harsher and more dissonant, it's somehow still very gratifying.

Slowly, this wall of noise does clear up to reveal the strings we heard toward the start of the track at the very end, too, making the whole experience of this track feel as if I just went through an intense hurricane that I just eventually outlasted, I guess.

I want to stress this track is the exception in the tracklist on this record. The vast majority of the songs here are really not all that long, which is interesting for styles of music that are known for taking their time occasionally. I mean, some of my favorites in the ambient and drone field are known to do a lot within the span of a classic rock song. (Take Tim Hecker, for example.)

However, I'm still blown away that miffle has the capacity on multiple tracks here to create a sense of time stopping within a matter of 90 seconds or so. The project has a great ending, a great flow. Again, it's just a beautiful, mind-bending listen: super textured, super pretty. I promise if you listen this thing while just shutting off the world, calming down, chilling out, you're going to have all sorts of different memories and visions in your head. It's crazy, which is why I can't recommend this enough.

I will say across the record, there were points where maybe I wished for or wanted maybe a touch more instrumental diversity. But all the various tape manipulations definitely do a lot to close the gap in terms of instrumental variety, which is why I'm feeling a strong 8 on this record.

Anthony Fantano. miffle. Forever.