Kagami Smile — Pool of Light
Kagami Smile has been ploughing this increasingly fertile field since 2016 and his debut Mouthtrip; a somewhat sickly brew of broken beats and extensive chopped-and-screwed style sampling détournement. Pool of Light is London based Dream Catalogue's final release of 2019 and witnesses this ghost technician deploying a sound peopled by the spectres of rave and deconstructed club music. Indeed the opening track For You in the Spring is reminiscent of Leyland Kirby's approach on his Death of Rave record; an elegy for dance cultures past, formed of the desiccated remnants of house and jungle. In Kagami Smile's hands the music is shorn of all its angular dynamics until it becomes a pulsing wind of scarcely tuned feedback and droning bass. The fog is allowed to clear slightly on the minimally titled but maximally amped For. Overdriven synths pulse as claps, hats and kicks struggle to cut through the noise, which is pitched just below the point at which the whole thing would lose cohesion.
If these two tracks were a pallet cleanser then what follows is certainly the main course. Suspended Bliss (When I last heard your voice) is eleven minutes of oceanic dub techno imbibing a healthy dose of Echochord as well as the more astral orientated moments of Jonas Rönnberg's Varg project. The track titles throughout the record hint at a narrative arc of romantic loss amid the passing of the seasons. Summertime couplings to the sound of immersive music, blurring the gap between bodies and persons. Some of these tracks seem to strain to represent a sense of being overpowered by events, losing oneself to emotional or drug induced states. But just as the galloping distortion and half heard female vocals of Us are like being swept along by a crowd, Autumn went, so did my dreams is the soul-crushing come-down. The sound is almost industrial now, muffled and introspective, drained of euphoria.
At several point the noise influence on the record produces some affecting layers of blown out tape distortion, which combine well with digital sources. Fans of Cremation Lily's recent experiments in dub-techno tape noise hybrids will find much to appreciate here. The final tracks For You this past Winter and Touch recapitulate the two sides of this record's take on heightened emotional states. The former is another powerful wall of driving shoegaze-like distortion and scarcely discernible rhythm, pushing the dynamics of club orientated music into hyperborean territory. The latter spreads its dysphoric sonics wide, drawing us into a spiral of downturned distortion and drones. At the mid-point of the track an almost robotic rhythm of hats and snares seems to signal a total breakdown of the personality as gloaming vistas of sound lead out only into a world of separation and alienation. At least that's one interpretation! Kagami Smile have produced a fine take on the amalgam of influences currently animating this corner of the UK electronic music scene. In some respects less ornate and subtle compared to many of his peers, Ryan Hill's focus on dynamics and texture nevertheless yields powerful and affecting results.