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Klara Lewis

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Klara Lewis, “Thankful” (Editions Mego, 2024)

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This latest solo album from Swedish composer Klara Lewis is billed as “a heartfelt tribute to her friend, mentor and former label boss, Peter Rehberg” and a “precise homage” to his “methodology and spirit.”  Notably, Editions Mego released Lewis’s debut album Ett in 2014 when she was only 21 years old and her vision has undergone some rather dramatic evolutions since then.  For example, one of my favorite aspects of Ett was Klara’s near-complete avoidance of conventional melodies or instrumentation.  While that stance has certainly softened over the ensuing decade, Lewis is still every bit as adventurous and unpredictable in 2024 as she was back then–her songs just happen to have stronger melodic hooks now.  In keeping with that “anything goes” spirit, Thankful is fascinating miscellany that delves into everything from solo ukulele performances, unhinged techno mutations, Disintegration Loops-style slow-motion melody obliteration, and an achingly gorgeous elegy.  Unsurprisingly, all are wonderful, which makes Thankful yet another characteristically excellent Klara Lewis album.

The centerpiece of the album is the opening title piece, which is a 20-minute loop-based opus inspired by Rehberg’s early laptop masterpiece “Track 3” (from 1999’s Get Out).  The aforementioned similarity to Basinski is admittedly a rather superficial one, as “Thankful” is essentially a melancholy string loop that gradually becomes more and more distorted and corroded as the piece unfolds.  In spirit, however, it is clear that Lewis is coming from a very different place altogether, as the transformation undergone by “Thankful” is considerably more elemental and violent than anything I would expect from Basinski.  As with the Pita piece that directly inspired it, Lewis’s piece steadily becomes a snarling, blown-out maelstrom that shares more common ground with a fucking volcano than with any melodic tape loop experiment.  In fact, a river of lava is a perfect analogy for the piece, as it is objectively beautiful while leaving a scorched ruin in its wake.

In an amusingly left-field twist, that blackened drone epic is followed by a very brief and unadorned ukulele piece (“Ukulele 1”) and then a relentless crunching and pounding industrial nightmare (“Top”) that lies somewhere between a warehouse techno banger that went completely off the rails and someone playing Space Invaders though a massive sound system that is about to blow up.  Notably, “top” was one of Rehberg’s favorite terms of enthusiastic agreement and I am sure he would have appreciated the maniacal, speed-shifting relentlessness of that piece, but I would personally reserve that exclamation for the tender, sensual, and absolutely sublime piece that follows (“4U”).  The flickering backwards melody and dreamy shimmer are especially effective in the wake of “Top,” as it makes me feel like my soul is ascending towards the divine light after my body was flattened by a runaway bulldozer.  The album then winds to a close with one final surprise, as Lewis returns to her ukulele with a vengeance for “Ukulele 2.”  It initially calls to mind the rustic willful naivete of fellow Swedes Enhet För Fri Musik, but soon follows the same trajectory as “Thankful,” as it feeds back upon itself until it is reduced to a gnarled and nearly unrecognizable ruin.  Fittingly, the storm eventually passes to leave behind a somewhat battered yet resilient ghost of the opening theme, which makes for a fitting and moving closing statement: Rehberg himself may be gone, but his outsized influence will definitely continue to ripple outwards and find new forms for years.  Top.

Listen here.

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Klara Lewis & Yuki Tsujii, “Salt Water” (The Trilogy Tapes, 2024)

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I am always eager to hear anything new from the reliably weird and inventive Klara Lewis, but the unpredictability of her collaborative releases is especially pronounced. Notably, Salt Water is the first of those collaborations in which I was not previously familiar with her creative foil. It also seems like quite a leftfield pairing on paper, given that Yuki Tsujii is best known as the guitarist for a hard-to-categorize Japanese rock band based in London (Bo Ningen). Fortunately, everything made sense once I learned that Tsujii is now based in Stockholm (Lewis is Swedish) and that he had previously collaborated with both Faust and Keiji Haino (his primal, convulsive playing here would be right at home on an album by the latter). Also of note: Lewis is described as a “loop finder” in the album’s description, which feels like an extremely apt description of her role on Salt Water. Unsurprisingly, the loops that she found are extremely cool, resulting in an album that often sounds like scrabbling guitar noise assaulting an eclectic array of ’60s exotica, classical, and film score samples.

The album opens in simultaneously promising and frustrating fashion, as Tsujii unleashes a fitful, stuttering, and scrabbling spew of notes over a gorgeously shimmering and pulsing loop. Initially, that feels like quite a winning combination, but it soon starts to overstay its welcome a bit and often feels too improvisatory to justify its nearly 9-minute running time (it’s more than twice as long as any other piece on the album). That said, it still ultimately winds up at an interesting destination, as the sounds gradually become more gnarled, grainy, and distorted in a way that calls to mind early laptop pioneers like Fenn O’Berg. The following “Close Up” also initially sounds like it could have been plucked from a laptop album circa 2000, as its haunting and sensuous vocal loop is strafed by sputtering static and possibly a chorus of frogs. Notably, however, Lewis and Tsujii quickly transcend that “early laptop” aesthetic to evoke something akin to a haunted sex lagoon, which is quite a neat trick. Moreover, the pair do not unnecessarily linger around and move onto the next piece after about three minutes, which feels like just the right length for a piece with the stylistic constraint of having a single repeating loop as its backbone.

It is probably fair to say that the rest of the pieces on Salt Water live or die based on the quality of Lewis’s central loops, albeit with some consideration regarding whether an individual piece errs on the side of being too short to be fully satisfying (several pieces are only a minute long). That said, I do genuinely enjoy Tsujii’s unconventional playing, as he gamely spews scrabbling entropy all over Lewis’s loopscapes in interesting ways. Analogy-wise, I feel comfortable in stating that Lewis’s loops are the cake and Tsujii’s guitar playing is the frosting: the guitars are rarely the most compelling aspect of these pieces, but they are certainly a very welcome enhancement. There are exceptions, however, as Tsujii’s playing does become a bit more central on the album’s second half (especially on the tropical-sounding “Welcome Back”). Also, the line between Lewis’s loops and Tsujii’s guitars can get rather blurry on pieces like “Dear,” where a descending classical guitar motif battles intrusions from retrofuturist computer bloops and various scrapes and harmonics from Tsujii’s electric guitar.

To my ears, the strongest piece on the album is “Bed of Sand,” which is built from a lovely classical guitar loop that unexpectedly slows and pitch-shifts into a somber and elegiac coda beset with surreal insectoid clicking. Elsewhere, “Pool” makes unsettling magic from an elusively shimmering and fluttering loop propelled by a lurching, groaning bass pattern. “One Two Three Embassy” is yet another highlight, combining a tense, obsessively looping string motif with spacy electronic sounds and a heaving, wobbly bass pattern. Just about every piece on Salt Water has some kind of inspired motif at its core, however, so the only real caveat is that a lot of these pieces feel like vamps, sketches, or snippets of larger improvisations rather than fully formed compositions. That is perfectly fine by me, as they cumulatively add up to an absorbing and unique album packed with great ideas (and a lot of great loops too). Obviously, the same can be said of Lewis’s other collaborations as well, but this album stands out because Tsujii’s aesthetic is more divergent from her sensibility than that of previous conspirators, resulting in quite an effective balance between sublime repetition and unpredictable and spasmodic spontaneity.

Listen here.

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Klara Lewis and Nik Colk Void, “Full-On” (Alter, 2023)

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As Alter’s album description insightfully observes, a collaboration between these two Editions Mego alumnae “somehow seemed inevitable,” yet I was still pleasantly surprised at how seamlessly Lewis and Void were able to combine their visions into something that feels both new and wonderful. On one level, the success of this union makes perfect sense, as both artists tend to turn out some of their strongest work in collaborative situations (Carter Tutti Void and Lewis’s KLMNOPQ EP with Peder Mannerfelt being prime examples of that phenomenon). However, both artists excel in extremely specific realms that have some limitations: Lewis is exceptionally good at collaging non-musical sounds, while Void seems particularly adept at crafting eccentric noise-damaged techno.

Obviously, beat-driven sound collages were a distinct possibility, but so were any number of other options, so I had no clear expectations about where this shared vision would ultimately land. Now that said shared vision has landed, however, I can confidently state that Full-On resembles a deeply unconventional beat tape and quite a good one at that. While I suspect some listeners will initially find the album’s kaleidoscopic parade of brief loops and vignettes exasperatingly sketchlike (there are a lot of 1-minute songs), I personally warmed to Full-On almost immediately, as practically every piece that made it onto the album is compelling, inventive, and endearingly idiosyncratic.

According to the label, Full-On is billed as a series of “intense miniatures” built from “the process of unadulterated experimentation and whimsical interplay,” which feels like an apt enough description to me. Any further generalizations beyond “this is basically an album of extremely cool loops” are hopeless, however, as it is damn near impossible to nail down a rough stylistic niche, identify who is playing, or even identify which instruments are being played (though it is probably safe to assume that any recognizable guitar sounds emanate from Void).

While the duo do provide a rough list of their sound sources (guitars, synths, euro rack modular systems, voice, sampling and outboard processing), the tools used are nearly irrelevant in the face of the extreme transformation that every sound underwent in the aforementioned whimsical interplay. Ingeniously, Lewis and Void treated the composition of the album as something akin to a game of ping pong, constantly challenging each other to take ideas further while also playfully derailing expected paths with teasing curveballs. That probably is not an ideal strategy for composing a conventionally focused and coherent artistic statement, but it does seem to be an ideal strategy for churning out an impressive number of great ideas and for crafting a fun and surprising departure from expected terrain.

A perfect illustration of the latter is “Junk Funk,” which sounds like a detuned and lo-fi would-be homage to House of Pain’s “Jump Around” (though Lewis and Void wisely restrain themselves from rapping, thankfully). Elsewhere, “Guitar Hero” sounds like a surf guitarist’s sound check chopped into stuttering and (eventually) blown-out abstraction, while “Pop” sounds like a hazy and sensuous cloud rap groove looping dreamily into infinity.

On the other end of the spectrum, the opening “Say Why” feels like an excerpt from a killer noise set in which crackling blown-out bass wreckage collides with distorted fragments of melody and visceral slashes of treble violence. “Green” is yet another fine noise detour, as it eerily transforms a voice loop into a relentlessly churning and crunching industrial throb. There are also several pieces that hypnotically delve into more ambient territory, such as the shimmering backwards melody of “Teeth,” the warm drones and echoing scrapes of “Found,” or the sublime warmth of “Travel With Friend” and “To Hold” (though the latter’s bliss is repeatedly threatened by a murky undercurrent). Additionally, there are some wonderful outliers that do not resemble much else on the album. “Swimming,” for example, sounds like it could be a two-second sample of an Arthur Russell cello melody looped and stretched into lazily churning ambient beauty with a slowed-down train rhythm. I was also quite captivated by “Ski,” which relentlessly loops a descending Turkish-sounding melody into increasingly jumbled and pitch-shifted mindfuckery, though I think I love the loop more than the piece itself. That brings up an interesting feature of Full-on: I cannot stop wondering what other directions these pieces might have taken or what might have resulted had any of them been expanded into something more substantial.

Naturally, If the album were less uniformly delightful, such thoughts would mostly be of the “ugh-what a missed opportunity” variety, but in this case they are more akin to experiencing a great film that ends with a cliffhanger: I love this album, but I also feel like this creative partnership is a long way from running its course.

Listen here.

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Klara Lewis, “Live in Montreal 2018” (Editions Mego, 2022)

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Klara Lewis has been a unique and consistently interesting artist ever since she first surfaced, but 2020’s Ingrid felt like a massive breakthrough and just about everything that she has released since has been stellar (live albums included). Unsurprisingly, Live in Montreal 2018 does nothing to derail that streak, but there are a couple of somewhat big surprises with it too. The first one is the date of the performance, as I had no idea that Lewis was on this plane two years before Ingrid came along. That is not to say that Live in Montreal would have necessarily eclipsed 2016’s excellent Too had it been the follow up, but the Lewis of 2016 was an artist who seemed categorically disinterested in doing anything the conventional/expected way. And the comparative melodicism of 2018’s fitfully great collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner (Care) felt like a one-off experiment in applying her non-musical found sounds to a more traditionally musical vision rather than a change in direction. 

As it turns out, however, Care was merely a tease of greater things to come and the lucky attendees of this performance got a sneak preview of those greater things long before the rest of us. The second big surprise is that this album is composed of seemingly all new material rather than variations on Lewis’s existing work—it feels aesthetically akin to a proto-Ingrid, but a stage before that piece was distilled to just a single perfect motif. Obviously, that narrowing of focus yielded great results, but this more varied and shapeshifting approach yielded some legitimately great results too, elegantly blurring the lines between drone, noise, spacy synth explorations, and pop plunderphonics.

As with a lot of live albums these days, the only significant difference in sound quality between Live in Montreal and one of Lewis’s more formal recordings is that it feels like there is a thin veil between me and the full harmonic richness, clarity, and crunching physicality of the music. Obviously, that is less than ideal, but that loss is presumably offset by a more significant gain like “it was not possible to reproduce the magic and spontaneity of this performance in a studio.” In any case, this album consists of a single 47-minute piece “with three distinct discernible sections” and an overarching theme of “permanent collapse” in which “strange sonic elements introduce themselves, rise to the fore, threaten the fundamental discourse only to recede on the brink of destroying the work itself.” 

While I sometimes have a hard time determining which elements constitute “the work” and which ones are the threatening interlopers as the piece unfolds, the trajectory of the opening section is quite easy to grasp: an intense choral sample plays over a subdued, gurgling, and crackling industrial rhythm, becomes erratic, then settles into a looping and haunted-sounding melody just as a visceral assault of white noise erupts. In a rough sense, it resembles a killer noise set tenaciously trying to tear its way through a classical requiem with only moderate success, which is a very appealing aesthetic given the fine balance of beauty and violence that Lewis achieves.

I am not sure if the noise element necessarily wins in the end, but the original choral theme is eventually reduced to a bleary drone augmented by woodland sounds like chattering birds while the noise/industrial elements rhythmically continue onward to steer the piece into a fresh passage of flanging drones over a heaving, crunching sea of roiling white noise. Gradually, however, it starts to feel like me and my chirping avian buddies are now at the seaside (along with some quivering feedback ghosts) as large waves relentlessly crash upon the shore, yet that too proves to be an ephemeral interlude, as Lewis soon starts to segue into her next dazzling set piece. While the next section could reasonably be described as “warm ambient drones,” they are vividly enhanced by a shapeshifting host of dissolving and hallucinatory new elements (hiss, submerged backwards melodies, glimpses of Spanish guitar, Whitney Houston belting out (nearly) unrecognizable fragments of “I Will Always Love You,” etc.). 

All of those other elements gradually vanish, however, leaving a gorgeously psychotropic and crystalline drone palace in their wake. For her final trick, Lewis ends the pieces with frayed, shivering synth swells that spectrally wobble over a stark backdrop of crackling textures. It is an appropriately beautiful conclusion to the set, but Lewis’s more impressive achievement is how organically fluid and compelling the journey to get there was: this album flows along wonderfully and the bridges between its major events never lull, nor does it ever feel like Lewis artfully stitched together a trio of different pieces into one. There is a definite arc to this album and it is a thoughtful and satisfying one with no missteps or unnecessary detours to be found. While live albums outside the improv/jazz milieu are historically not my favorite thing, this one is a rare and notable exception, easily ranking among the finest releases in Lewis’s already impressive discography.

Samples can be found here.

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Klara Lewis & Peder Mannerfelt, “KLMNOPQ” (The Trilogy Tapes, 2021)

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I believe this is the first formal collaboration between these two Sweden-based artists, but the pair have a long history together, as Mannerfelt’s label released one of Lewis’s early EPs (2014’s Msuic). While I was not sure quite what to expect given the breadth of Mannerfelt’s oeuvre and Lewis’s continuous evolution, I was reasonably certain that this collaboration would be wonderful no matter what shape it took and I was not disappointed. The closest reference point for KLMNOPQ is probably Lewis’s killer Ingrid EP, as nearly all of these five songs feature churning, blackened drones or murky, gnarled loops of some kind. 

The twist, however, is that Mannerfelt and Lewis take that roiling intensity in an unexpectedly playful direction without sacrificing much gravitas. The closing “Full of Piss and Vinegar” captures the duo at the height of their gleefully mischievous loop mangling, as it resembles a nightmarishly chopped-and-screwed mariachi band, yet this entire EP is filled with endearingly inventive and perversely anthemic variations of obsessively looping and psychotropic sound collage.

The opening “Sell Art” nicely sets the tone for the entire EP, as blown-out, heaving drones slowly churn beneath a trilling hook that sounds like a repurposed mariachi trumpet melody. The central melody sounds pleasingly frayed and ghostly like a ravaged tape loop, but the more impressive feat is how Lewis and Mannerfelt seamlessly transformed festive traditional music into something resembling a techno anthem in the throes of a bad break-up. It is quite a neat trick, as there is an underlying playfulness and dark sense of humor, but the result is legitimately poignant and weirdly haunting nonetheless. 

Another theme in “Sell Art” that recurs throughout the album is the duo’s love of obsessively repeating and layered loops, which has long been a realm in which Lewis excels. In the second piece, “My Clementine Is Making Paella Tonight,” a repeating chord swell holds the focus as a steadily intensifying undercurrent brings a relentless sense of forward motion and brooding urgency. Near the end, the consistent rhythm dissolves to make room for more freeform percussion, resulting in something that sounds like Z’ev pounding plastic oil drums along with a Fossil Aerosol Mining Project album. Next, “Styrofoam Tone” amusingly wrongfoots me again with something that sounds like the vocal hook of some ’90s dance hit chopped apart and rebuilt into a seething and hiss-soaked nightmare. The following “You Need to Be Kind” also sounds like an isolated pop fragment telescoped into an unintended new soundworld, albeit one taking a churning, fuzzed-out, and spacey ambient bent. 

The EP then closes with the aforementioned “Piss and Vinegar,” which sounds like a pre-bullfight trumpet fanfare frozen in suspended animation, then erratically allowed to play out a bit more before it locks into a different fluttering loop. From there, it only gets increasingly disorienting and weird, calling to mind Throbbing Gristle DJing a Mexican street festival and doing their best to get fired. My sole caveat with this EP is that every song feels like layers of loops manipulated with real-time mixing as opposed to more formal compositions, but most Klara Lewis fans (myself included) will be more than happy to hear a bunch of great loops being expertly manipulated and imaginatively juxtaposed.

Samples can be found here.

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Klara Lewis, “Ingrid” (Editions Mego, 2020)

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I was quite curious to see which direction Klara Lewis’s latest album would take, as her previous solo releases were generally quite radical and hyper-constrained in their avoidance of anything resembling conventional instrumentation. While both Ett and Too are aptly described by Editions Mego as “eerie rhythmic variations,” such a summary falls short in conveying the uniqueness of Lewis’s vision, as it often felt like she was quixotically attempting to compose pop songs solely from murky field recordings and decontextualized fragments of beats and melodies. With Ingrid, however, Lewis makes a dramatic and unexpected aesthetic reversal, as she slowly transforms a haunting and melodic cello loop into a wonderfully gnarled and heaving longform piece.

This album, a one-sided LP, is intriguingly billed as an improbable blend of William Basinski-style loop disintegrations and black metal intensity. In a general sense, I suppose Ingrid can reasonably be described as exactly that, but the similarity to Basinski’s work lies primarily in Lewis’s compositional technique rather than its tone. Great Basinski albums like El Camino Real and 92982 are extremely nuanced, tender, and dream-like affairs. Ingrid, on the other hand, evokes something considerably more raw and primal.

In fact, it can reasonably be described as “nightmarish,” though it definitely feels nightmarish in an arty Japanese horror film way rather than a “shrieking church-burners in face paint” way. Moreover, it maintains an earthy, physical foundation even as it becomes increasingly volcanic and frayed. In more practical terms, that means that Ingrid opens with a bittersweetly beautiful and emotionally resonant cello melody, but it soon becomes disconcertingly frozen in time, damned to repeat the same short melodic fragment for all eternity (or at least the duration of the album). While the initial melody is a poignant and sensual one, the “locked groove” moment isolates just a brief fragment of slow-motion, see-sawing melancholia and obsessively repeats it for the next nineteen minutes.

Admittedly, that frozen melody is quite a cool trick, but the meat of the album lies in how Lewis increasingly corrodes and distorts that fragment as the piece unfolds. At first, the transformation merely manifests itself as a quivering and shimmering haze that radiates outward from the dense and groaning string loop. I cannot tell exactly what Lewis is doing or how she is doing it, but it seems like the loop and its lingering hallucinatory nimbus begin to increasing feed back upon themselves, resulting in fluttering oscillations and occasional swells of sharper, more ringing tones. 

As that happens, the low end starts to gradually amass rumbling intensity as well, as each repetition of the loop feels like a more intense subterranean surge than the last. At a certain point, the central loop starts to feel like just one component in a much richer tapestry of layers, as it becomes increasingly subsumed by the roiling, distorted low end while the high-end shimmer coheres into something resembling a structured chord progression. Aside from that, the piece’s rhythm transforms as well, as the gnarled, smoldering undercurrent of distortion lingers and lags enough to fall out of phase with the central theme’s original pulse. Once it reaches its seismic crescendo, however, Lewis gradually allows the heaving elemental power of the low end to fade away, leaving behind an unexpectedly tender and lovely coda that almost feels like dreampop or shoegaze.

For the most part, I have absolutely nothing critical to say about Ingrid, as it is a flawless, hypnotic, and impressively relentless piece of music with a purposeful trajectory and an elegant symmetry. I even appreciate the unusual format, as it drives me crazy when people release longform pieces that require me to flip a record at some arbitrary midpoint. It is heartening that Lewis both acknowledged the limitations of the vinyl format and found a clever way around them (an important skill in this current period of vinyl supremacy). 

However, I will say that Lewis’s earlier albums were objectively a bit more original and unlike anything anyone else was doing. That said, plenty of wildly inventive artists release disappointing albums because originality and execution are two separate things. My favorite artists tend to be those that manage to strike an optimal balance between bold ideas, vibrant production, and compositional craftsmanship and Lewis absolutely nails that trifecta with this album.

Given that, I feel fairly confident in stating that Ingrid is a major creative breakthrough for Lewis and possibly her best album to date as well. It is undeniably still a cerebral and conceptually interesting work, but those artier tendencies are a hell of a lot more effective when they are woven into a roiling tsunami of visceral power and emotional intensity. I suppose that might be where the metal influence most strongly manifests itself, as Lewis has blossomed into a formidable composer who has managed to extract the cool and dangerous elements of the genre without bringing along any of its flaws. The result is an experimental music album that sounds like it could beat me up, steal my girlfriend, and decimate a hotel room, which definitely has a stronger and broader appeal than any similar fare with a less favorable balance between the cerebral and the physical.

Samples can be found here.

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Klara Lewis and Simon Fisher Turner, “Care” (Editions Mego, 2018)

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The news of this intriguing collaboration delighted me, as Klara Lewis has carved out quite a wonderfully idiosyncratic and incredibly constrained niche over the last few years by largely avoiding any recognizable instrumentation. Consequently, I had no idea at all what would happen when her surreal collages collided with Simon Fisher Turner’s formidable talents as a composer. As it turns out, a pure collaboration resulted, as Care does not particularly resemble either artist’s previous work. Instead, it feels like several divergent albums have been deconstructed, warped, and obliterated to leave only some lingering shards in a shifting and hallucinatory fantasia of drones, textures, and field recordings. That fundamental disjointedness can admittedly be a bit challenging at times, but Care ultimately comes together beautifully with the lushly rapturous closer, “Mend.”

From the first moments of the opening epic “8,” it was abundantly clear to me that Care was going to be quite a bizarre and disorienting experience that would sidestep just about every expectation that I had. That statement is not meant as unambiguously rapturous praise, as my mind was not instantly blown or anything—the album simply takes a very different path than I imagined. For example, I have always found Lewis’s collages to be tightly and meticulously crafted, yet “8” is an extended dive into a fog of amorphous, drifting, and abstract phantasmagoria. It does not have anything remotely resembling a conventional structure or even anything resembling an unconventional structure, as nothing is constant at all.

Instead, it feels like I am floating weightlessly through an ether of ghostly drones, vaporously indistinct voices, and submerged song-fragments that is unpredictably and jarringly disrupted by stuttering and jackhammering deconstructions of sultry dance anthems. I doubt I would even describe it as having “dream logic,” yet it is still a strangely compelling piece solely because the duo manage to make seemingly benign snippets of pop music feel lysergic and haunted. While I have personally never died, “8” feels like an eerily uncanny evocation of what the final mental spasms of death might be like: near-silence mingled with occasional intrusions of real ambient sounds like voices and birds, as well as colorfully vivid and ephemeral blasts of disjointed memories.

The following “Drone” is considerably less of an uncategorizable mindfuck, initially resembling a brooding and throbbing dip into Fisher Turner’s soundtrack work. At some point, a strange harmonica- or hurdy-gurdy-like motif emerges and it seems like something more significant might cohere. That proves to be an illusion, however, as the piece instead dissolves again into a mysterious coda of crackling noise. Elsewhere, “Tank” takes a somewhat similar trajectory, blurring together moody cinematic atmosphere with eruptions of noise and dreamlike snatches of field recordings from far-away places. 

Of the two pieces, “Tank” fares a bit better at achieving a kind of “hallucinatory travelogue” feel, but I still cannot escape a nagging desire for the duo’s fragmented entropy to cohere into something more structured in a lasting way. Instead, Lewis and Fisher Turner just conjure up the occasional fleeting glimpse of a surreal and vivid vista that quickly dissipates back into abstraction. The album’s sole exception to that tendency is the swooningly lovely closer “Mend.” 

Like the rest of the album, “Mend” is composed of just a few simple pieces precariously held together, but differs from them in that the woozily squirming central theme is quite a strong one and it remains constant. In fact, it even steadily builds as the piece unfolds, gradually transforming from an undulating, liquid drone into a vivid crescendo of swirling and howling tendrils. There are also some crackling and enigmatic radio transmissions in the background to deepen the experience, but the real magic is the main theme itself, which constantly heaves, shudders, and sways like a massive, slow-moving snake.

I am always a bit confounded when an album features one piece that is on a completely different plane than all of the others, as I tend to wonder if an artist just decided to release an album to showcase that one piece or if the other pieces were also intended to be great in a way that somehow eludes me. Given the caliber of the participants here, I have to assume it is the latter, especially since “8” displays an extreme attention to detail and sound design. The uncharitable interpretation would be that Lewis and Fisher Turner had some excellent but divergent ideas and the only way they could seamlessly bring them together was by completely obliterating them into kaleidoscopic fragments.

The alternate possibility is that the duo set about making a boldly experimental headphone album that feels more like a memory virus than a series of structured compositions: intriguing, sharply realized forms erratically appear only to disintegrate, dissolve, or get pulled apart until they are just another part of an enigmatic and living fog of real and imagined sounds. If so, that was a great idea, though I remain perplexed by the execution. For now, I merely like that unapologetically abstract side of the album, while I absolutely love the more conventionally structured “Mend,” but I am open to the possibility that the rest of the album will someday grow on me if I immerse myself in it long enough.

Samples can be found here.
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Klara Lewis, “Too” (Editions Mego, 2016)

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When I heard Klara Lewis’s self-released EP back in 2012, I was deeply impressed with how effectively she shaped her “found sound” collages into song-like structures, but worried that such an abstract and purist approach would be extremely limiting in the long run (it is hard to craft hooks without vocals or instruments, obviously). As it turns out, my misgivings were largely unfounded, as Lewis has proven to be quite adept indeed at finding inventive and varied ways to exploit her unusual palette. 

In fact, she seems to only be getting better and better at unlocking its deeper possibilities rather than backing herself into a corner. That said, the content of Too probably will not surprise anyone who picked up 2014’s Ett, though it may be a little less rhythmically focused. That is not a detriment though. In fact, it may even be liberating, as Too definitely feels more rich, otherworldly, and emotionally resonant than its predecessor. More importantly, it features “Beaming,” which is a work of absolute brilliance.

Over the course of her brief career, Klara Lewis has quietly revealed herself to be a remarkably assured artist working within some rather rarefied terrain. On one hand, her liberal use of non-musical source material makes her very much an experimental music artist, yet she seems genuinely intent on shaping her extremely non-commercial sounds into almost-songs with almost-hooks and almost-grooves. It is a tough balance to maintain, but it is a welcome departure from the willful insularity and obtuseness that plagues so much experimental music. 

I think the most succinct and glib way to describe her niche is “it sounds like someone trying to DJ a party armed only with albums from Touch artists.” Such sounds definitely do not lend themselves to floor-filling fun easily, yet Lewis often achieves a kind of understated, spectral genius and pulsing subterranean throb with her work, feeling like a bleary, kaleidoscopic, and dreamlike afterimage of nightlife rather than the flesh-and-blood actuality.

Lewis maintains remarkably high standards throughout Too‘s nine pieces, never stagnating, delving into filler, erring into derivative territory, or degenerating into more predictable or straightforward fare. It is all good. There are several songs that stand out for various reasons, however. The first is the rather brief “Twist,” which is shaped from reverberant metallic clangs, an erratic rhythm of dynamically active and phase-shifting clicks, shadowy drones, and an obsessively repeating swell that sounds like a single organ chord processed into unrecognizability. 

The following “Too” is something of a left-field masterpiece, opening with an unexpectedly slow and sensuous groove built from backwards drums, ghostly vocal snippets, and an actual bass line. After dissolving briefly into abstraction, however, the groove reappears in much heavier and explosive fashion, as it sounds like Lewis is now backing a shit-hot free-jazz ensemble of trumpeting elephants. 

Later, “Beaming” reaches even more dazzling heights, opening with surprising warm and hissing drones that sound like they are being dreamed by a futuristic machine. Gradually, some distant field recordings start to seep in, as do some crackling and echoing intercom transmissions. The overall effect is both absolutely gorgeous and absolutely hallucinatory. In fact, it may very well be the most perfect piece of music that I will hear this year. Describing it as lushly melancholic and otherworldly is a good start, but it actually evokes something far more unique than that: it is almost like simultaneously hearing our world and a beautiful alien transmission at the same time in heavenly juxtaposition.

As far as flaws are concerned…well, there just are not any to be found. At worst, Lewis is content to merely weave a quietly throbbing industrial reverie between her more ambitious pieces, but even those are wonderfully distinctive and satisfying. I want to say that the genius of Too lies primarily in the lightness of Lewis’s touch, but this album is actually a goddamn pile-up of unwaveringly great decisions: the textures, the mood, the song durations, the production—just everything. The lightness of touch is quite crucial, however, as Too is a gorgeously vaporous and beautiful album shot through with just enough disquieting darkness to make it all feel like a precarious dream. Such a highwire act could have been easily derailed by something as simple as a clear melody or a too-forceful rhythm, but none of that happens and spell remains both intact and beguiling until the last notes fade. Klara Lewis is a sonic sorceress and this album is amazing.

Listen here.