| Artist: Kettel & Secede Album: When Can Released: 26 November 2012 |  |
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It is a sincere pleasure to navigate the sonic terrain of When Can (51'12"), the great collaboration between Kettel & Secede. Reimer Eising and Lennard van der Last are two Dutch Electronic Musicians recording under the names Kettel and Secede. STAR'S END listeners will have become familiar with them by way of their respective Sending Orbs releases Vollyed Iron (2004) and Tryshasla (2005), which have both received substantial airplay. When Can is their first (and long-awaited) album together, and presents larger compositional elements over "let's just jam" fireworks. The duo makes music in a rainbow of sounds and songs drawn from gamelan to pop, via jazz, electronica and minimalism. There is nothing else quite like it. The interplay of light and dark, of colors and textures commands attention, as they raise synthesizer color to the level of line, melody and rhythm. Layers of timbre fall away as new ones are added easing one episode smoothly into the next. As fairy voices gently sing "sweet dreams forever" above harps and emotive string pads, elsewhere on When Can drums are commanding a more dramatic space beneath reverberant cathedral chanting and synthetic atmospherics. Full of ever changing structures and rich sensory detail this album may be soft and accessible in one area while being tense and obscure in another - its more advanced harmonic language leading either to dissonance or consonance. With its field recordings, voice samples, strange tones and delightfully odd rhythmic turns When Can is full of surprises - for the mind, body and spirit. Kettel & Secede has brought form to a kinetic new genre, producing music open enough in which to know your own thoughts, yet with a force strong enough to transfer this duo's ideas to the listener. Their inimitable magic arises out of a collective imagination seemingly unbound.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 14 March 2013 | |
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