Alberto Balsalm

The rhythm here is the thing that makes no immediate sense and then gradually reveals itself as the only rhythm it could possibly be. Stuttering, chopped, displaced from any obvious grid — the beat pattern sounds like someone playing a straight rhythm through a machine that keeps hiccuping — and yet the whole piece has a feeling of inevitability once you've adjusted. Melodic elements float above and through this fractured architecture, warm synth tones that carry a low-grade wistfulness, not quite sad but leaning that direction, like nostalgia for something you haven't lost yet. The piece has a domestic, almost miniature quality: it doesn't fill space, it occupies a specific corner of it. The name — borrowed from a brand of hair conditioner — gives you something of the right frame. This is mundane-transcendence music, music about ordinary Tuesday afternoons where nothing happens except your own interior weather. There's a wit to the construction that keeps it from sentimentality, a slightly off-kilter quality in every choice, as though beauty is being arrived at through the slightly wrong door. It belongs to a particular mid-1990s British electronic sensibility that found the profound in the banal and made a virtue of emotional indirection. You reach for it when you want the texture of feeling without being forced to identify which feeling exactly, when you want company that doesn't ask anything of you.