Zzzt. Beeeeoo. The room filled with the glow of 80 small, flashing LED lights. The equipment was strewn throughout the room, connected by standard black coax cables. An 8" green monochrome monitor displayed a flat, straight line that would hop to life, mapping a thousand soundwaves, as soon as Mike Paradinas desired it. A moment of calm silence ensued, and then, with the tap of a single button, the LEDs switched from red to green. Here was the finished project.

The stacatto filled Mike Paradinas' studio. Labeled instrument Xyb044 took a leading part on viola. Bells chimed over the strings as the lights flashed in rhythm. "Scaling." Paradinas mouthed the word, titling the piece that had cost him all of Monday, a day which might otherwise have been spent eating unsalted rice cakes and enjoying the warm comforts of "Interior Motives" on HGTV. It was to be the opening track in his final opus, Royal Astronomy, and it sounded great with those out- of- control skittering, jazz breaks.

"My work will transcend the greatest composers known to man," Paradinas schemed. That's when the fuse blew. "Fuck!" Mike raced to the laundry room, flipped the switch marked "Studio1," and shot back upstairs to see what damage the outage had caused. The room was silent, aside from the sound of the mainframe's rebooting hard disk. The equipment had been reset and now sat eagerly awaiting Paradinas' next command. Mike checked the programming. All the music was there... but where were the underlying subtleties, the neat effects, and most importantly, where was the rhythm?! Poor Mike hadn't saved his progress.

In the days that followed, Paradinas plunged into the depths of his deepest depression since "Alf" was removed from NBC's Monday night lineup. He spent weeks in denial, teary and uninspired, until it hit him: he could get by pitching the largely percussionless album as a new direction for his work. Elaborate electronic chamber music! This would certainly be the next big thing. Of course, some songs did seem to miss his trademark drill-n-bass beats. For these select few tracks, he would program some standard beat filler just to spice things up. And by the end of the day-- bang!-- Royal Astronomy.

Alright, that's probably not what really happened. But listening to this record in contrast to the sensory overload of 1997's Lunatic Harness, and even his earlier work on albums like Bluff Limbo and In Pine Effect, it's clear that something snapped in the ambition department of Paradinas' neural net. Here, we're presented with 14 tracks of mostly lush orchestration and very little beat. Now, I don't know about you, but if I want to hear a symphonic masterpiece, I'm probably not gonna go digging through the record store's "club" section to locate it.

And, to put it as gently as possible, Paradinas is no Ravel. I've been listening to this record for months, trying to locate its place in modern electronic music, and it just doesn't fit anywhere-- not because it's so vastly different from what's being done out there these days, but because it's so tossed- off. It's sad to see an artist as obviously talented as Paradinas release an album that sounds like it took a weekend to record.

Royal Astronomy offers very little for fans of Paradinas' work, and next to nothing for the electronic music fan-- it's µ-Ziq without the µ-Z. It's hard to say at this point whether µ-Ziq has lost his edge. I mean, it's conceivable that this record is just a transistion to something completely new and different. But one thing's for sure: this album is boring as shit.

-Ryan Schreiber