Microstoria’s ‘Init Ding / _snd’: Noise as Language, Glitch as Gospel

It doesn’t begin. It fragments. From the opening seconds of Init Ding / _snd, Microstoria shatters the expectation of form, of rhythm, of narrative. What’s left isn’t silence—it’s something stranger: curated chaos.

Originally released in the late ’90s and now resurfacing with a new generation of ears more attuned to algorithmic pattern than analog pulse, this two-part collection from Jan St. Werner (Mouse on Mars) and Markus Popp (Oval) is less an album than an interrogation. Each glitch, each hiccup of circuitry, is intentional. Each synthetic stutter becomes a syllable in an alien language we’re being dared to learn.

The Machine Dreams in Broken Syntax

This is not music for passive listening. It resists you—aggressively, elegantly. It asks you to listen wrong, to forget everything you know about composition and let the dissonance lead. There are no melodies, no crescendos—just layered interruptions, digital fog, sonic accidents made deliberate.

“Init Ding” hums like a broken motherboard meditating. “_snd” twitches with the haunted logic of early internet noise—unresolved, spectral, almost living. These tracks unfold like old modems singing to themselves: eerie, mechanical, weirdly nostalgic. And behind the crackle, you begin to hear something human—like a hand brushing static in search of connection.

Is Noise the Last Honest Music?

Microstoria’s work sits in the lineage of post-structural sound—where glitch isn’t failure but feature, where error becomes aesthetic. What they offer isn’t beauty in the traditional sense—it’s integrity. Here, the flaws are the message. The skips, the warps, the loops—they reflect our own fragmented perception, our own digital disintegration.

This isn’t ambient. It’s awareness. Every second demands presence. You don’t play this music in the background. You submit to it. And somewhere in that submission, a strange transcendence blooms.

The album doesn’t end so much as cease transmission. And as the last glitch flickers into absence, the question lingers—what if this mess of noise is closer to truth than any harmony we’ve ever trusted?