Midorinozu - Lost Horizons [Review]

I just assumed Midorinozu was a new artist when I noticed this album in my Bandcamp feed, but it’s actually a collaborative effort from a couple of old favourites - Mike Cottone, better known to those outside of his Detroit suburb as The Green Kingdom, and Tim Martin of Maps and Diagrams fame. After consulting my lawyer, I should disclose that Mike has released an excellent ambient album on TSMM’s record label, in fact the last one before the label went on paternity leave.

If you’re not aware, he’s a guitar-playing, melodically inclined ambient producer by night and a graphic designer by day. He’s been releasing music on some of the world's best ambient labels - Dronarivm, ROHS!, Lost Tribe & Sound In Silence to name a few, as well as self-releasing to widespread acclaim for almost twenty years now. If you like softer-edged ambient sounds, or are curious what else your guitar can do, check him out.

Tim Martin has been in the ambient game for a similar amount of time, and if anything is even more prolific than Cottone, which is quite an achievement, especially as his work is more intricate. As well as his bread-and-butter Maps and Diagrams moniker, he also utilises various other aliases depending on the release direction; I’ll leave you to have some fun discovering them. Somehow he also finds time to run the quality-assured Handstitched ambient label, whose catalogue is another treasure trove of ethereal endeavour.

Tasty-looking collaborations don’t always work well, but I’m happy to report this is a beauty. The pair aren’t trying to break personal stylistic ground, each seemingly doing what they do best: Cottone handling the gently shapeshifting, guitar-powered, glowing aura, and Martin scattering sonic shards, pleasant glitches and found sounds of indeterminate origin, seemingly randomly at first, but slowly revealing the method in his madness. And it really works.

The album openers, ‘radius-drifting’ and ‘when flowers awake’, beam through the speakers like a Hari Krishna smile thanks to Cottone, before Martin gets to work with splattering the tracks with sonic minutiae, which rather than distracting, adds a welcome citric twist to the syrupy soundscapes. It seems the pair were just tuning up though, and slowly but surely sounds start to coalesce into rhythmic frequencies, tonal refrains reveal themselves, and by the time the sparkling ‘dark tide’ eventually meets the faster flowing ‘across broken time’, paddling is no longer necessary. Surprisingly, the momentum is then percussively augmented on ‘meridian echo’, the dull thuds the perfect anchor for Cottone’s now more recognisable guitar lines, and a Balearic beauty is born; just too late for this season, but if this doesn’t soundtrack a few sunsets next year I’ll be disappointed.

But just as you’re logging into booking dot com, along comes the somewhat tangential, mystical, slightly chillier sounds of ‘moon garden’, that despite its subtle rhythmic skeleton and its inherent quality, somewhat breaks the warm ambient spell, and I can’t help feeling would have been better seeing the album out, although ‘quiet spectrum’ and ‘arc motion’, that do say farewell, revive the album’s warm and wavy vibe. If summer isn’t quite gone where you are too, do yourself a favour and listen to this on the porch with a cucumber-infused (tasty tip) gin and tonic.

If this is your sort of ambient and chilled Balearic vibes then you should definitely check out Fabiano Do Nascimento & E Ruscha V's Aquaticos LP.

This review ran in TSMM's October 18h newsletter. If you'd like album tips direct to your inbox or the Substack app — plus the odd bit of industry insight and existential musing from TSMM HQ — you can subscribe here.

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