Michaela Melian

• Genre: Laptronica

About

Berlin's Michaela Melian creates dark, dense, fantastical soundworlds with a gothic, fairy-tale feel; her music might be the soundtrack to a film adaptation of a Brothers Grimm tale. Using a mixture of acoustic instruments (piano, acoustic guitar, cello), electronic sounds and extensive digital processing, she sculpts rich, contemplative tone poems that hover between ambiance and song. A former member of the eccentric, avant-pop group F.S.K., Melian released her first solo album in 2004, on Gudrun Gut's Monika Enterprise; Baden-Baden was an unlikely merger of dreamy glockenspiel melodies, sampled acoustic loops and no-fuss drum-machine beats, all converging in a blissful wash. On the 2007 follow-up Los Angeles, Melian mostly put away the drum machine and concentrated on creating intense, liquid atmospheres. The result was an instant ambient classic.

- Philip Sherburne