Audiopile Review: We’ve said it before, but we’ll keep saying it until you lot start paying attention. Max Loderbauer is one of the most underappreciated electronic music producers evar. From his 1990s ambient techno work with Sun Electric, to his collaborations with Ricardo Villalobos, to his consistently brilliant solo albums… This guy can do no wrong. ‘A Day or Two’ is the new album from nsi., Loderbauer’s duo with Tobias Freund. They’ve been putting out quality stuff since their 2007 debut on Sähkö, but this one has the feeling of what-it’s-all-been-leading-up-to. ‘A Day or Two’ is a massive, 90-minute, purely ambient epic that covers an extraordinary range of beatless forms and functions. Loderbauer’s melodic sensibility takes a back seat to his knack for harmonic sophistication, structured drama, and alien textures. This is a deeply science-fictional imaginary soundtrack. It will have your mind skimming over the surfaces of far-away worlds in no time at all. An hour-and-a-half of this stuff is deeply affecting. While the music is often sparse and quiet, the hypnotic intensity never lets up. And neither does the quality.

“Planing axes between iridescent new age ambient, sublime folk and avant-classical, to miasmic drone and plangent shoegaze; ‘A Day or Two’ charts the Non Standard Institute’s first actions in 6 years and serves as a compelling reminder of their intuitive work in abundance. Expanding and contracting their sound across 18 parts, they arc from heaving, oddly-tuned drones to smoggy, surreal soundscapes, bringing a wealth of fine-tuned instincts to the table. With Max Loderbauer’s 35+ years as Berlin ambient pioneer with Sun Electric, jams with Villalobos, and roles in Vladislav Delay Quintet and the Moritz von Oswald Trio, he’s matched by Freund’s 40 years of deep engineering expertise embedded in the experimental industrial and techno trenches.

The melancholy, Satie-laced piano meditations that grounded 2018’s ‘5863’ are gone, and the human touch that’s been present since their very first collaborations is placed under the microscope, enhanced by their use of the Haken Continuum Fingerboard, a gestural synth that was developed to open up new modes of playing. Loderbauer’s experience with the piano helps him make the most of the instrument’s touch-sensitive 3D surface, while Freund uses two multi-channel loopers, piping the sounds through his arsenal of pedals.

The 18 tracks are billed as “unplanned atmospheres” that arc from sombre, drone-heavy material to humid, tape-saturated imaginary-island jams such as ‘Listening To Cells’ and ‘Are You One Of Them’. On the latter, the duo work patiently, letting dusted string plucks tumble across each other while warbling pads hum below, bending like flutes. On ‘Unlikely Events’, anxious didgeridoo-like wails are ruptured by environmental rattles, before ominous voices lead us into a pocket of industrialised resonance. In time, the skies open up and the sounds morph into pastoral song, the drone blurring into hopeful pads almost as lucid and eloquent as AFX’s ‘SAW Vol. II’, with sonorous synths that float over formless strings. Reflective, cinematic arrangements for flute and silvery ambient give way to diffusions of denser, resonant polychromatics and pucker up in outernational, alien ambient impulses recalling Connor Camburn jamming with dirashe folk pipes.

A very special album to get lost in, coming to us from one of the buy-on-sight labels of our time.” -Boomkat