The production does the heavy lifting, and it does it with a jeweller’s patience. Kleiner treats the human voice \u2014 Lucy Rod’s, specifically \u2014 less as a vocal track than as raw material, something to be diced, pitch-shifted, folded back into the mix until it stops being a woman singing and becomes weather. Phrases arrive chopped and rearranged like light through leaves; a lyric will surface for half a bar, dissolve, and reappear somewhere else entirely, transposed a third up and dressed in glitch. It’s a trick plenty of producers attempt and few pull off without the whole thing curdling into gimmick. Here it stays warm. That’s the achievement worth dwelling on: electronic manipulation this intricate usually arrives cold, clinical, pleased with its own cleverness. “New Misty Morning” keeps its pulse.<\/p>
Rod herself deserves the top line. Argentinian by birth, unplaceable by delivery, she moves between conventional lead vocal and abstracted texture with a lightness that never tips into weightlessness. When the track lets her simply sing \u2014 really sing, melody intact, no chopping \u2014 the effect lands harder for the restraint shown elsewhere. She’s the human constant in a mix built from fragments, the one thing Kleiner never quite dissolves, and the song is wiser for holding her back rather than atomising her completely.<\/span><\/p> Melodically the track sits closer to pop than the Awaywhere backstory might lead you to expect \u2014 closer to a sun-bleached Caribou single than to the ambient sound-design one might brace for from a “multimedia dream world” pitch. That’s to its credit. Ambition dressed as accessibility beats accessibility dressed as ambition, and Kleiner seems to understand this instinctively: the hooks are real hooks, the choruses lift, the glitch serves the tune rather than obscuring it. Curiosity, not confusion, is the governing emotion, and it’s rare to hear a record this technically fussy stay this genuinely inviting.<\/span><\/p> Thematically it’s slight but well-chosen \u2014 the wonder of arriving somewhere unfamiliar, rendered in sound rather than explained in interview quotes \u2014 and it suits the song’s function as a doorway into Kleiner’s wider universe of animation, illustration and interactive storytelling. Judged purely as a single, divorced from the mythology around it, it still holds up: a confident, colourful piece of electronic pop that trusts its own textures enough to let a voice wander through them unresolved. Judged as a first transmission from an entire imagined world, it’s rather more exciting than that \u2014 a soft opening that makes you want the rest of the map.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/www.awaywhere.com\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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