4 | 2 | 3

When MIZU appeared at the Noguchi Museum last summer among the late American sculptor's playfully imaginative pieces, it felt like kismet, given the Brooklyn cellist and composer's similar architectural sensibility. At delightful heights Forest scenesreleased earlier this year, used field recordings and digital effects to depict a vivid virtual landscape, but on her third album, album/4-2-3″ class=”external-link” data-event-click=”{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://iammizu.bandcamp.com/album/4-2-3"}” href=”https://iammizu.bandcamp.com/album/4-2-3″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>4 | 2 | 3turns to grim seriousness.

MIZU's music has come a long way since her gorgeous yet simple debut album, Long intervalseven his lyric tone paintings Forest sceneswhose embrace of electronics signaled her rejection of the buttoned-down classical world. The expanse of gray 4 | 2 | 3 it swims in shadowy reverb, industrial pulse and spartan bow. The album is rooted in MIZU's score for choreographers Baye & Asa's eponymous workin which the riddle of the Sphinx-What has four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at night?—became a metaphor for humanity's fraught relationship with technology. Such a theatrical scale is second nature to MIZU. Her concerts can feel like carefully executed dances, her bow like a waving knife while ribbons hang from her hair. Her long acrylic nails have become part of her stage persona, even as her makeups have veered toward the sinister. Her contribution to Baye & Asa's apocalyptic vision is suitably muscular and grim. clearly understood the brief.

A deeply unsettling quality permeates 4 | 2 | 3which is structured around long, steady notes and slow, repetitive crescendos. The album's hour-long length gives her more room to play with repetition, variations in phrasing and swirling drones. Three numbered tracks each offer breathing space—thoughtful throat-clearings before plunging into the next shady track. On more coherent tracks like “Sphinx” and “Rounds,” she pushes and pulls her material with an almost natural force—a given phrase can first sound triumphant, then turn into something mournful, punctuated by pulsating white noise—while the digital malfunction erodes the edges of the sound field.

The marching pace of 'Mob' is something new for MIZU. It's the first time he's worked so explicitly with electronic percussion. Piledriving rhythms accompany some of the record's most intense and extreme textures, as drones cause panic. Similarly, experimental edges color the spectral wash of “Vapors” and the simmering “Stations”, with its unsettling percussive thump. MIZU's composition and production is more abstract than on previous records. where Forest scenes set against a background of field recordings, 4 | 2 | 3 aspires to the condition of a more elemental kind of sound, ominously monolithic. At least, that is, until the spare and mellow closing track, 'The Riddle'. Here, MIZU designs an elegiac arrangement before gradually wrapping it in filters and distortion. As it fades, the decaying phrase evokes a dancer winding down on the ground at the end of a long performance.