THU., NOVEMBER 01, 2007
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Comfort Music for Restless Ears: Kranky Records
by Philip Sherburne
If the Kranky label lived up to its name, it almost certainly wouldn't have lasted this long: cranks tend to wear out their welcome pretty quickly. But the Chicago label is stronger than ever as it moves into its 15th year, boasting a catalogue of albums now into the triple digits. (To commemorate the milestone, the label is issuing a remastered edition of its first release, Labradford's excellent Prazision LP.) Long something of a sleeper label, Kranky is enjoying a burst of genuine buzz thanks to the recent success of incendiary psych-rockers Deerhunter, who have proven the toast of critics everywhere from the blogosphere to the New York Times. (As if that weren't enough, tastemakers' tastemaker Lindsay Lohan recently cited Out Hud's "It's for You" as "her go-to DJ song" in an interview with Maxim magazine. What's next, a Godspeed You Black Emperor! appearance on Gossip Girl?)
GYBE!, of course, is almost certainly Kranky's best-known act; moody "slow-core" bands like Low and Stars of the Lid also helped build the label a devoted following among post-rockers. But Kranky has never had a specific sound — although it's also true that many of its releases (and to my ears, many of its best) tend to fall on the quieter end of the spectrum. I often think of the catalogue as comfort music for restless ears: a spongy bed of drones punctuated by eureka moments that could set the whole thing alight if they burned one degree hotter. There's a particularly organic quality — not necessarily in the sense of "natural" sound sources, but in the sense that the label's music almost always feels unusually alive. The band Growing reflects that idea in its very name, the perfect complement for music that feels works a slow-motion explosion at the cellular level.
Many of my favorite Kranky records tend to emphasize drones. Harmony in Ultraviolet, by the Montreal-based computer musician Tim Hecker, was rightly praised far and wide as one of 2006's more astonishing accomplishments. The sonic equivalent, perhaps, of an Olafur Eliasson installation, the album feels gaseous and suffused with an inner light. Aside from occasional traces of synthesizer, it can be as hard to tell where discrete sounds come from as where exactly they begin and end; one could easily imagine a skipping CD of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music run through some sort of rosy-colored filter, paired with a reel-to-reel tape of My Bloody Valentine — running backwards — having a similar effect. It's at once intimate and monolithic, welcoming and forbidding.
Throughout the record, a fine, needle-nosed whine suggests the firing up of electric lights as the day's afterglow clings tenuously to the surface of a river.
Greg Davis' pensive Somnia and Chihei Hatakeyama's Minima Moralia both offer kinder, gentler versions of the same idea. Shimmering and unstable, Hatakeyama's "Bonfire on the Field" feels like a flurry of metal filings shaved from thousands of bells of different sizes. The music may be "abstract," but titles like "Granular Haze" fit the material perfectly. On a few of Minima Moralia's more outgoing tracks, guitars duel demure digital clicks and there's even a brief horn melody, as melancholic as Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner, while distant organs sound as heavenly as if the keys were being pressed by the weight of sunlight alone.
Another of Kranky's ambient standouts, Chris Herbert's lovely and forlorn Mezzotint, feels a bit like Burial with the beats removed. That's not to say that there's no pulse; its rhythms simply turn on a much slower scale. Throughout the record, a fine, needle-nosed whine suggests the firing up of electric lights as the day's afterglow clings tenuously to the surface of a river. That description could also fit Loscil's Plume, a gorgeous album brimming with Rhodes shimmer and cool digital pulses. All of Loscil's releases are well worth downloading, but Plume remains my favorite. Indeed, it's one of my favorite bedtime records, period.
Another way to describe Kranky, I suppose, would simply be as "psychedelic" — not in the sense of lava lamps and amoebic projections, of course, but as music that has uncanny ways of opening up the mind. Space prohibits me from going on at length about some of the wonderful ways this psychedelic propensity gets woven into Kranky artists' various approaches — Strategy's underwater ethno-dub-house-bellchoir music, say, or Benoît Pioulard's stubbly electro-acoustic pop, which with its fragments of distant and overdriven electric guitars and reverb-soaked pianos feels like a scarf knit from a motley collection of mismatched yarn. I could fill an entire column writing solely about Valet's Blood Is Clean, a solo effort from Honey Owens (a member of Nudge and Jackie-O-Motherfucker) that reminds me of His Name Is Alive's classic Livonia in its lo-fi drift.
One recent Kranky release, White Rainbow's sublime Prism of Eternal Now, is as psychedelic — if ever so quietly so — as anything the label has ever released. You could probably guess that just from a glance at the band's name, the album title, and tracks like "Mystic Prism," all of which might seem insufferably psych if the music weren't so compelling. The CD release's back cover can't be viewed on eMusic, which is too bad, because it puts the whole project in a slightly different perspective; it's essentially a parody of the famously quirky labels found on Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, the biodegradable, peppermint-scented, hemp-based concoctions designed for everything from showering to laundry to brushing teeth, long a staple of hikers, Deadheads and Greens. It's refreshing to find a sense of humor attached to such unselfconsciously mindblowing music. But I wonder if the gag doesn't express a deeper truth about Kranky in general: the label's music is so potent that a drop or two of the stuff, in almost any context, works wonders. It's potent, good for the world and if you pay very close attention, you might even catch a faint whiff of peppermint lingering about the edges.
GYBE!, of course, is almost certainly Kranky's best-known act; moody "slow-core" bands like Low and Stars of the Lid also helped build the label a devoted following among post-rockers. But Kranky has never had a specific sound — although it's also true that many of its releases (and to my ears, many of its best) tend to fall on the quieter end of the spectrum. I often think of the catalogue as comfort music for restless ears: a spongy bed of drones punctuated by eureka moments that could set the whole thing alight if they burned one degree hotter. There's a particularly organic quality — not necessarily in the sense of "natural" sound sources, but in the sense that the label's music almost always feels unusually alive. The band Growing reflects that idea in its very name, the perfect complement for music that feels works a slow-motion explosion at the cellular level.
Many of my favorite Kranky records tend to emphasize drones. Harmony in Ultraviolet, by the Montreal-based computer musician Tim Hecker, was rightly praised far and wide as one of 2006's more astonishing accomplishments. The sonic equivalent, perhaps, of an Olafur Eliasson installation, the album feels gaseous and suffused with an inner light. Aside from occasional traces of synthesizer, it can be as hard to tell where discrete sounds come from as where exactly they begin and end; one could easily imagine a skipping CD of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music run through some sort of rosy-colored filter, paired with a reel-to-reel tape of My Bloody Valentine — running backwards — having a similar effect. It's at once intimate and monolithic, welcoming and forbidding.
Greg Davis' pensive Somnia and Chihei Hatakeyama's Minima Moralia both offer kinder, gentler versions of the same idea. Shimmering and unstable, Hatakeyama's "Bonfire on the Field" feels like a flurry of metal filings shaved from thousands of bells of different sizes. The music may be "abstract," but titles like "Granular Haze" fit the material perfectly. On a few of Minima Moralia's more outgoing tracks, guitars duel demure digital clicks and there's even a brief horn melody, as melancholic as Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner, while distant organs sound as heavenly as if the keys were being pressed by the weight of sunlight alone.
Another of Kranky's ambient standouts, Chris Herbert's lovely and forlorn Mezzotint, feels a bit like Burial with the beats removed. That's not to say that there's no pulse; its rhythms simply turn on a much slower scale. Throughout the record, a fine, needle-nosed whine suggests the firing up of electric lights as the day's afterglow clings tenuously to the surface of a river. That description could also fit Loscil's Plume, a gorgeous album brimming with Rhodes shimmer and cool digital pulses. All of Loscil's releases are well worth downloading, but Plume remains my favorite. Indeed, it's one of my favorite bedtime records, period.
Another way to describe Kranky, I suppose, would simply be as "psychedelic" — not in the sense of lava lamps and amoebic projections, of course, but as music that has uncanny ways of opening up the mind. Space prohibits me from going on at length about some of the wonderful ways this psychedelic propensity gets woven into Kranky artists' various approaches — Strategy's underwater ethno-dub-house-bellchoir music, say, or Benoît Pioulard's stubbly electro-acoustic pop, which with its fragments of distant and overdriven electric guitars and reverb-soaked pianos feels like a scarf knit from a motley collection of mismatched yarn. I could fill an entire column writing solely about Valet's Blood Is Clean, a solo effort from Honey Owens (a member of Nudge and Jackie-O-Motherfucker) that reminds me of His Name Is Alive's classic Livonia in its lo-fi drift.
One recent Kranky release, White Rainbow's sublime Prism of Eternal Now, is as psychedelic — if ever so quietly so — as anything the label has ever released. You could probably guess that just from a glance at the band's name, the album title, and tracks like "Mystic Prism," all of which might seem insufferably psych if the music weren't so compelling. The CD release's back cover can't be viewed on eMusic, which is too bad, because it puts the whole project in a slightly different perspective; it's essentially a parody of the famously quirky labels found on Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, the biodegradable, peppermint-scented, hemp-based concoctions designed for everything from showering to laundry to brushing teeth, long a staple of hikers, Deadheads and Greens. It's refreshing to find a sense of humor attached to such unselfconsciously mindblowing music. But I wonder if the gag doesn't express a deeper truth about Kranky in general: the label's music is so potent that a drop or two of the stuff, in almost any context, works wonders. It's potent, good for the world and if you pay very close attention, you might even catch a faint whiff of peppermint lingering about the edges.
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