You may well ask what these two gentlemen have in common.
Here's the answer: they both wound up in a directory on my
hard disk together of mp3s of questionable provenance, and were
burned in a shuffled order together onto CDR for my morning walk.
The Kleine "Beyond Repair" seems to be, like Bola and others, an attempt to
further mine the stylistic ideas of IDM circa 1993: Midtempo lo-fi breaks
and lush melodies with echo-y filligrees of filtered white noise percussion.
This sort of thing lives or dies by whether it is musically valid -- i.e.
independent of the conventions of the genre, there's something there that
is compelling music. By that standard, these tracks are alive.
Donna Summer is a whole nother thing: "This Needs To Be Your Style"
is the fix point of obsessive rearrangement of the insanely familiar.
"What You Truly Need" is a fractally deconstructed version
of Earth Wind And Fire's "Shining Star" that follows it's own crazy
curve out into the complex plane away from it's source. And it's
funky! Akufen does stuff like this that's not quite so frenetic,
and hides it's sources better, but leaving the original source
material accessible to the listener is rather the point of stuff like
this.
Listening to them together (Kleine and Summer) there's a nice synergy
where the two artists complement each other. Kleine always runs the
risk of relaxing into the comfy chair of New Age, and Summer's ADHD
freneticism is the antidote. Summer has some issues with shrillness
and jokiness, that get mellowed nicely by Kleine's smooth considered
approach.
Both of them deserve an over-portentous otaku examination by some
tweedy writer in The Wire, but it's enough for me to just say they
both rock me like a hurricane.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org