Mondii's curtly-titled t:p is the aural equivalent of astronaut food: vacuum-sealed and sterile-- all the nutrients of regular music distilled into brittle prisms and packaged in airtight foil. t:p hangs in orbit, half in love with the terrestrial world of cricket chirps at evening and radiators rattling like dry bones, but still enamored of the pure ethereal abstraction of deep space. Consequently, Mondii's debut is always in suspense, nailed to the upper air, bemoaning the pedestrian beauty of the earthbound while dreaming of the escape velocity that could hurl his music into pure physics.

Mondii himself (aka Nao Sugimoto) knows this shuttled existence well, living in transit between Chicago, London and Tokyo; he wears these respective electronic scenes on his music like the stickers they used to put on luggage. On top of the global flux of the expat lifestyle, Mondii is also a student of world music, particularly that of Africa. The odd nostalgia for the ordinary that one could discern coded in the cold simplicity of his sparse beats often comes off as primitivism. In the absence of birds, Mondii mixes in squawks and tweets; in the absence of weather, Mondii simulates raindrops and quiet zephyrs, in the absence of humans, Mondii creates faint whispers and laughtracks, beats that dodge like footfall down an alley. It's all he can do, it seems, to suppress the emptiness that pervades the album. The overwhelming sense is one of isolation. There's not enough air in space to make music; what little oxygen he can pump in is burdened by the simulated sounds of home.

And yet there's something noble about the whole effort. Drawing from sources as diverse as Autechre, Tortoise, Balinese gamelan and the great percussive zeal of Mtume, Mondii plays cosmonaut among the vast silence, planting flags in whatever will hold them. t:p exhales a steady breath of chipped beats, faint reverberation and odd yawns of computer noise; the background is thinly populated by voices and pouring water, digital sizzles and animal mating calls.

There are distinct parallels with Lo Res' brilliant 1999 release, Approximate Love Boat, which similarly flirts with alien-like reproductions of all things human and banal. Lo Res, however, had the good sense to concoct a ludicrously ingenious sci-fi plot to situate the work among the pod-people and the nebulae. Mondii has forgone any such attempt to justify his twittering forays into deep space, perhaps because he's still unsure that space is the place. Perhaps he's not the man they think he is at home. He's a rocket man...

-Brent S. Sirota