RESTOCK ARRIVING LATE SEPTEMBER
Wonderful new long player from hyper-prolific Swedish composer, Klara Lewis, ranking as perhaps her tenth(?) album and arguably also her best. The key trick to Opening, and indeed a good deal of Lewis’ practice, is the process and manipulation of acoustic and electronic sound, sampling, looping and reconstructing halfway familiar textures (is that Lee Hazlewood I hear?) and tones into haunting vistas, caught in some liminal limbo adjacent to Mica Levi and The Caretaker, but really actually terraforming her own alien landscapes. More crucial however is how such conceptual work adds up to something so affectingly human - you can hear the person in these fractured and damaged vignettes, their strange decay the very basis of their humanity. Opening isn’t so much a sad sounding album, but it is unusually emotive, and of what I’m not entirely sure, a soundtrack perhaps to a film about things falling apart or maybe just about holding together. Doesn’t that sound like a familiar story? Lewis takes such familiarity and makes it new again. No doubt a primo talent hitting her best form.
FFO: Mica Levi, The Caretaker, Valentina Magaletti, Sarah Davachi, Oliver Coates
