Brian Leeds has spent his career making music that sounds like light hitting water at an oblique angle — present, beautiful, slightly hard to locate. As Huerco S, he built a reputation on lo-fi ambient and house that felt like 5pm in November: low-lumen, slightly damp, entirely its own thing. His 2022 album Plonk started warming the palette, and his Loidis project pushed further still, towards something more rhythmically confident and structurally ambitious. From the Toolkit of Lovers is where both trajectories arrive. The scale is the first thing that needs addressing: 111 minutes across six sides of vinyl is a commitment that most artists have no business asking listeners to make. Leeds mostly earns it. The album draws on the microhouse lineage of early-2000s acts like Luomo — music that treats a single synthesizer chord as an ecosystem, places snares with the precision of a watchmaker, and rewards the kind of focused listening where you're zooming in on a single hi-hat pattern one moment and appreciating the full structural arc the next. What separates this from competent microhouse archaeology is the sound design. The synth chords carry Leeds' signature degraded shimmer — a quality he's been refining across projects, but here deployed at a scale that lets it breathe. Stereo effects pan with what the review accurately describes as 'quicksilver physicality,' a phrase that earns its place because it maps something real: these sounds move through the room, not just across it. The ASMR-inducing texture isn't a gimmick — it's doing structural work, giving the listener's attention something to grip. The melodic writing is where the album makes its clearest bid for distinction. The playful echoing notes in TT Stunt and the Afrobeat bassline in Running Rich aren't decoration — they're the kind of recurring motifs that give a long-form electronic album genuine architecture rather than just accumulated texture. Leeds understands that at this runtime, you need landmarks, and he places them well. The second half is where the album's ambition slightly outruns its execution. A couple of tracks lose the spirit of adventure that characterises the best of the record — they're not bad, but they're closer to competent interval music than the psychedelic detail-world the album builds at its best. At 111 minutes, 'mostly riveting' is a serious achievement; at a tighter 80 minutes, this might have been something close to definitive. The scale is a choice, and it's a defensible one, but not an unqualified success. The Loidis project as a whole — including the 2024 album One Day and the stunning James K remix — suggests Leeds is in a genuinely productive creative phase, one where the formal rigour of his Huerco S work is being cross-pollinated with warmer temperatures and wider rhythmic vocabulary. From the Toolkit of Lovers is the fullest statement of that synthesis. The 90 good minutes here aren't just good — they're the kind of thing that makes you want to sit in a room with good speakers and let your attention do something it doesn't usually get asked to do.
