Some records ask for silence… others ask for motion. i++, the debut album by maeh, asked for a train.
I was listening to it while riding a bullet train line through the center of Spain during a business trip, a context that unexpectedly became part of the record’s meaning. Due to nationwide safety restrictions following a recent accident (a sad story for another place), the train was running far below its usual speed. The landscape stopped blurring. Snow lightly coated the plains, crops, and scattered trees, muting everything into soft contrast. At one point, a deer darted across the field. It felt like time had been downgraded to an earlier version of itself, and nostalgia hit like a drug. It was at that moment that i++ filled that slowed-down soundscape.
The album’s title borrows its name from the increment operator in programming (a symbol for moving forward by the smallest possible unit, as stated by the artist). For maeh (Junseo Kim), who produced the album during 34 months of mandatory alternative military service as an IT engineer, that operator becomes a metaphor. This is the sound of versioning the self under constraint, of growing not through dramatic leaps but through repeated, sometimes painful recompilation.
From the first seconds, i++ establishes its emotional grammar: longing and nostalgia without comfort, and a sometimes strange, unresolved beauty. Sonically, the album sits at an interesting intersection of alternative rock, indietronica, lo-fi, noise, and shoegaze, but those tags are not a fair representation of what’s actually happening. This record behaves less like a genre exercise and more like a memory system under stress. It is fragmented, recursive, and haunted by its own artifacts.
maeh has described the album as a journey toward a “faint but existing miraculous sea”, a world imagined as broken but beautiful, the way a child might envision perfection without knowing its rules yet. That image quietly structures the album. Water appears again and again in the lyrics. Sometimes, as white seas, others as crumbled ones, places where memories drown or drift away.
The cover art reinforces this: a cross-shaped ceramic object floating in ambiguity, functioning simultaneously as buoy and lighthouse, promising not safety, but direction. That sense of navigation carries through the track sequencing.
The opener, “understanding,” is barely more than a gesture: sample mangling, distortion, and stereo motion compressed into a short, fragile statement. It feels less like a song than a system boot with just enough signal to confirm something is alive.
“request…” follows by plunging directly into the core aesthetic of the album. A muffled electric guitar and bass form a murky foundation beneath slow, distorted drums, while piano glitches flicker in and out through delay and reverb. The bass is unusually clear, acting as an anchor point in a mix otherwise comfortable with disorientation. Vocals float above the arrangement, heavily processed, diffused. When maeh repeats “I’ll believe in miracles” the phrase feels almost like a conditional statement. Belief as an if-clause.
This tension between emotional sincerity and sonic obstruction defines much of i++. Instruments are frequently difficult to identify. Voices slide between human and synthetic. Effects are not decorative; they are structural. Distortion, aliasing, and lo-fi degradation are not used to signal grit so much as to imply memory loss.
From a production standpoint, i++ is unapologetically in-the-box, and proudly so. maeh themselves told me they mostly rely on standard VSTs and stock plugins, pushing them through aggressive layering and processing rather than chasing boutique textures. Guitars (often played on an old electric instrument) are rarely allowed to exist as guitars for long. They are filtered, stretched, saturated, and spatialized until they occupy a hybrid role somewhere between harmonic bed and noise source.
This approach pays off particularly well on “birthplace,” where vocals move at a glacial pace, treated to the point where they blur into surrounding textures. At times, it’s difficult to tell whether a sound is a voice passed through a vocoder or a guitar routed through formant filters and modulation. That ambiguity feels intentional. Identity is unstable here.
“vanda” pushes further into shoegaze territory, with thick, lo-fi distortion applied across much of the spectrum. Reverb is omnipresent, but not lush in a conventional sense. It smears transients and obscures edges, creating a wall of sound that feels both immersive and isolating. When the lyrics speak of memories drifting further away, the mix enacts that idea in real time.
The short interlude “oscil” acts as a borderland moment… ambient, meditative, and minimal… before “maedow ii” introduces a more pronounced rhythmic pulse. Lo-fi chimes and softened synths lend the track a distinctly indietronica character, while the slow tempo allows space for reflection rather than momentum. The production remains restrained, but emotionally precise.
“far” is built on contrast. A high-pitched intro collapses into deep bass and a grounded beat that persists through the track, creating a vertical split between fragility and weight. It’s one of the album’s most effective uses of low-end (or rather, low-mid, since the track doesn’t try to fill up the whole spectrum). It’s as if the bass doesn’t push forward or downward.
“winglike” stands out as a quiet centerpiece. Heavily distorted vocals paradoxically make the drums feel clearer and more immediate, a perceptual trick that works because of careful spectral balancing. The lo-fi aesthetic here becomes meditative. When the lyrics speak of protection “like wings,” the production mirrors that sentiment by cocooning the listener in texture without suffocating them.
Track titles like “4” resist easy interpretation, and the music follows suit. This is one of the densest pieces, filled with layered synths, guitars, faster drums, and even orchestral textures. It rewards repeated listening, not because it reveals a hidden hook, but because its internal relationships slowly come into focus. Timbre is the narrative device here.
“seasons” marks a deliberate shift. Distortion recedes. Guitars and vocals come through with unusual clarity. Drums are punchier and slightly faster, giving the track a sense of forward motion absent elsewhere. It’s a moment of lucidity, a brief clearing in the fog.
That clarity makes the return of noise on “misunderstanding” feel all the more jarring. This is one of the album’s most challenging tracks, in my opinion: embracing glitch, digital artifacts, and aliasing as compositional elements. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s meant to be.
The closing track, “…response”, is one of i++’s most fully realized productions (together with “seasons”). At over three minutes, it allows themes and textures to breathe. The mix feels more resolved, acknowledging the conflict between the sonic elements.
i++ is an album about perseverance, rather than triumph. It is all about continuing to compile yourself under imperfect conditions. Its emotional weight comes from repetition, restraint, and an insistence on forward motion measured in single, slow steps.
Listening to it while the train moved slowly through snow-covered fields felt accidental at first. By the end, it felt inevitable. This is music for transitional spaces. Places left behind and futures not yet rendered.
i++ doesn’t ask to be understood immediately. It asks to be revisited. Increment by increment.
Written by Gabi SaltaSoles, producer and storyteller
