On their follow-up to the 2005 Mosz release 7 Million, the duo of Stefan Nemeth and Florian Kmet, aka Lokai, decide to insert within the chrome corpuscles of their machines the acoustic reverie of jazz. Not that this becomes some Impulse(ive) blowing session or a long-lost faux Blue Note gathering, mind you; Lokai are too much the digital provocateurs to allow something as unseemly as mere genre pastiche to pollute their precious digital bodily fluids.

No, Transition is literally what its name implies. Nemeth and Kmet aren't necessarily innovating this time out but instead wish to find some pleasurable meeting ground where the vital components of jazz and its rich thematic history can rub equal shoulders with mouse-clipping, agile new software, and laptop script. Overall, the scheme is reasonably successful — at its short running time (37 minutes), Transition doesn't wear out its welcome so much as wear its mandate on its sleeve, and by that measure one wonders whether Nemeth and Kmet are better off enjoying the progressivism of digitalia rather than attempting to turn nostalgic heads backwards.

Bits of flotsam and jetsam, post-electronica-wise that is, abound — the similar exploits of Kieran Hebden's Four-tet project, some of Susumu Yokota's more delicate frequencies, aspects of Kriedler and Tarwater rear their aspect ratios as well — but Lokai aren't rank copyists. Savvy compositional skills certainly hold any imitative propensities at bay, so that what is left are whispers of jazz ghosts past, augmented by the ghosts of new machines. "Panarea" gets downright nasty as its rush of silicon motion flits past before the gentle murmurs of guitar quiet things down. "Volver" is all plucked ambience and springtime Americana, with faint Rhodes splurts decorating the background. "Glimmer" uses melodica to disarming effect, projecting what strange creatures might be glimpsed in some nocturnal Asian fever dream. What is ultimately broached here is an intermittently entertaining, if occasionally lackluster, "stopgap" project by the Lokai contingent; hopefully Nemeth and Kmet have something more daring up their sleeve once their new evolution takes hold.

Lokai: Transition Is On Sale at Squidco!