Kris Kuldkepp — Moonutatud Muudused / Distorted Conversation
Kris (or Kristin) Kuldkepp is an Estonian electroacoustic and improvisatory musician. Her website lists various installations and works she has been involved with, and she has several recordings on Bandcamp.
Her latest album "Moonutatud Muudused / Distorted Conversation", is apparently a study in double bass, but you wouldn't know it by listening, as the sounds of the instrument are curiously morphed into a droning ambient current, peppered with rustling, rattling and dull wooden impacts. You could say the instrument is used primarily in a percussive manner, with plucks and slaps being the only distinctly recognizable sounds characteristic of a double bass.
The album begins with an oceanic wash of filtered analogue noise, which gradually subsides in favour of softer melodic drones in round waveforms. There is near silence for several minutes, pierced by celestial high-frequency tones at times, reminding me of early 00's deconstructionist works by Richard Chartier. By the end of the 15-minute opener, we're somewhere closer to Nurse With Wound's "Man with the Woman Face", a surreal swirl of skittering manipulated field recordings, flitting and flickering like bugs' wings, almost forming a metered rhythm, but ultimately more nebulous.
The second piece "Muundumised / Transfigurations" is much shorter, an exercise in cold, detached dark ambience with glimmers of melodic harmonics. Listening closer, the harmonics are frantically bowed double bass, cascading across a massive sound space with heavy delay. It is a similar blend of ingredients to the processed instrumental ambiences of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Band, with a common esoteric tone, as well.
The third and final piece "Küllastumine Nõudmisel / Saturation on Demand" is twenty-one minutes long. Forbodingly dissonant, this one begins as a resonant, ashy cloud of wailing tones, filled in with a crackling midrange distortion. Much like the first piece disperses into ambient subtlety from an initial rush of noise, we gradually move through dimly lit subterranean expanses, with murmuring semi-melodic whistles of wind. This part could be compared to Lustmord, Inade or other classic dark ambient artists from labels like Cold Meat Industry or Cyclic Law. There is a satisfying vastness to this track, and a sense of cold stone.
This is a splendidly deep album of moody dark soundscapes, with great variety and richness of tone. The fact that it was created from instrumental recordings is hardly perceptible, but was clearly an inspired approach considering the multifaceted and listenable result. The vivid texture of the dynamic, high-resolution production shows remarkable skill with digital processing and precise mixing. To find out more