West London’s Kessoncoda are the duo of drummer Tom Sunney and keyboardist Filip Sowa. Standing firm between acoustic tradition and electronica, Kessoncoda is founded on a unique blend of melodic ostinato-laced piano and unwavering drums. Drawing on their array of musical interests, Fil and Tom take influence from rock, electronica, ambient, breakbeat and soundtracks for film and artists such as Squarepusher, Radiohead and Clark all hot-housed in their unique studio set-up, a shed at the bottom of Tom’s garden. They’re developing a new vision of jazz revolutionized by lulling dance music.
Like former and present Gondwana Records label mates such as GoGo Penguin and Portico Quartet there’s something strongly cinematic about Kessoncoda’s music, like a narrative arc which unfolds through different themes and moods, with an ebb-and-flow of intensity, as breath-taking swells of melody burst into being, eventually to resolve in a wondrous climax.
There’s also a deliberate undercurrent of post Covid unease which is encapsulated in the title Outerstate. “this feeling of being within a group of friends, and you're chatting, and you’re physically there but mentally you're not at all – you're somewhere else, a really weird state of being.”
