Two releases from the wonderful superpolar Taïps label, both from much earlier this year which I never got around to writing about. Each comes from the brilliant brain of anonymous Cologne-residing bassist / electronic artist bleed Air, whose work I’ve written about here before.
Temporary Second Residences comes from bleed Air’s side project five Bubble criteria, a pseudonym that shares little in common with the main alias apart from a curious use of capitalisation. It offers a suite of 15 (mostly) instrumental, post-rock pieces each built from unswerving drums delivered at a meditative pace over which are draped highly melodic guitar lines and occasional vintage analogue synth tones. The one time the tracks veer away from the fully-instrumental template is on ‘How Was Your Day Today?’, when Michael Cramm from Cologne’s Van Zoyd pops up to offer some spoken word musings.
The ethos behind the album was to collate pieces recorded while on the road, each one from a different place (not disclosed) during the last decade. The introspective phrasing and somewhat melancholy outlook feels very familiar to the sense of displacement and disconnectedness that I often feel when I travel with my day job. I imagine it will become an album I revisit time after time on planes and trains. Appropriately, this review was written on another plane, on another trip across the Atlantic.
My personal favourite piece is ‘Violin Spider’, one of several to feature warm and fuzzy analogue synth textures alongside guitar, while ‘Sabaudia’ features a nice detour into a jazz-guitar passage which is then replaced by a sweet wandering melodica melody. I hear nods to a whole bunch of artists here, but for some indefinable reason I’m chiefly reminded of Appliance and Tortoise.
Sticking with bleed Air, their eponymous debut album is the other release I never wrote about – either when it was first released in 2020 or when it received a nice lathe cut vinyl and cassette repressing earlier this year (the vinyl is sold out; a few copies of the cassette reissue are available). It features a female duck on the front cover. I like ducks.
Marco, superpolar Taïps’ creative mastermind tells me it’s the label’s biggest seller to date. It’s not hard to see why. It is a collection of vaguely Kosmische electronic tracks with a neatly inquisitive tonality, something that the guitar work in the five Bubble criteria album also shares. It’s a suite stacked to the rafters with filter sweeps, contemplative arpeggios, wonky beats and fat Moogy bass notes, which very occasionally leans into lo-fi territory.
‘I TEL’ is one of my favourite tracks here. Featuring beats straight out of an organ rhythm generator, rich long held synth tones and a twinkling melody that sparkles like the ice in the drink I was just served by a BA cabin crew member, the glue that holds ‘I TEL’ together is a low-slung bass guitar passage from bleed Air. To me, it sounds like something I heard on a compilation of soundtracks by Can’s Irmin Schmidt from years ago, only dear Irmin would never have allowed anything he composed to wander off quite so freely. Elsewhere, the resolute ‘Mars Yard’ feels like a track recovered from a box of unreleased Warp tracks, artist unknown, all mid-1990s post-electro beats and post-techno wiggly arps.
To bleed Air’s credit, this purported mixtape is neatly diverse in its reach. Each track has its own distinct personality but a common instinct that stops this feeling like a sprawling endeavour. I’m just sorry I missed it the first (and second) time around. As a robotic voice intones on ‘Mindfuck’, this is embarrassing.
The sold-out vinyl and cassette reissues of bleed Air by bleed Air were released April 6 2026. The original album was released September 4 2020. Temporary Second Residences by five Bubble criteria was released May 1. Both releases were via superpolar Taïps.
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2026 Further.
