eMusic Guide to Kranky Records

Kranky's great skill is escapology; it's practically defined by its ability to evade definition. If there is received wisdom about the Chicago label, it's as a home for abstracted guitars, moody soundscapes and occasionally spiky electronic beats: all very serious, very studious, very intense. Maybe when Bruce Adams and Joel Leoschke founded it in 1993, it could have been pegged as an indie label that tended toward the experimental — but with each release it slips under, around and away from standard categories. "Post-rock" doesn't capture the sheer variety of its guitar-based output; "ambient" is far too vague a term for its more textural releases and "electronica" doesn't even come close to describing its more far-out sonic experiments. For every jittery and discordant Nudge record, there's a Tim Hecker that washes over you in blissful waves; for every Charalambides creeping around disturbing mental corners, there's an Out Hud that leaps out. What unites all of them is a sense of switched-on intellects, outsider intelligences seeing what can be done with sound without getting sucked into academic self-regard. The sounds themselves ebb and flow into new shapes with almost every release. Eighteen years into its existence, Kranky dares you to try and pin it down.