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A few weeks ago Boston bid farewell to John Francis Lindsey and his solo electronic project Ming Ming. A going-away party was thrown for him at Bombs Over Swagdad, O'Brien's' monthly hip-hop night, and people in the scene lamented the loss of a talented musical mind. Turns out, he wasn't leaving us for Los Angeles or New York — dude just moved to Hadley to join Dom. But before he brought his warped aural vision ever-so-slightly westward, Ming Ming dropped debut record Ultrameta OK on Sacramento label Lefse (home of Ganglians and Youth Lagoon). To understand this experimental eight-track roller-coaster through instrumental sound, it's important to relate to Lindsey, the creator. Raised in Virginia, he is a classically trained pianist and cellist who was turned on to electronic compositions in middle school via broken drum machines and pirated copies of Max/MSP and Cool Edit. Lindsey moved to Boston in 2007 to attend Berklee, then transferred to MassArt to study film. There he merged the far-reaching corners of his life-long education to make music in a more cinematic way, using tape dumps and reel-to-reel layering and overdubs to create a wealth of new headtrip sounds. "Murder of the Most Artful" is the most pop-leaning, a three-minute wobble that slowly morphs into a blip-groove romp, and the atmospheric "Ringer Park Girls" is a synthed-out, swagged-out analog boast that's impossible to pin down. If the future is soundtracked, Ming Ming is already writing it, recording it, fucking it up, re-recording it, and then re-playing it backwards.
