08th December 11
VOUCH: John Hassel of Seekae on Kettel
Posted in Interviews, Reviews
We’re in the business of recommendation round these parts. It’s absolutely and physically inherent to what to we do. It’s the way that over our combined lives we’ve found some of the best music and some of our most personally treasured albums – through word of mouth or an innocent tip off. We devote a lot of our time looking forward, so much so that we miss a big fraction of the opportunity to look back; to mine other people’s record collections or spend winter afternoons in the dusty back room of Record & Tape Exchange just sifting through records. In something of an attempt to correct our gaze, we’ve started asking artists to provide us with a recommendation. Be it one album, one artist, one track… or whatever sound it is that they feel inexplicably linked to.
The second artist to take up this mantle is the experimental Australian trio, Seekae. Their album +DOME lands on Monday through the Rice Is Nice/Popfrenzy imprints and on it they fuse live instrumentation with electronics creating what their PR is calling ‘a homage to the band’s passion for bass-heavy club sounds of the new decade’. In reality it’s one of those akward marriages of sullen guitars and clever micro programming that works masterfully. On ‘Go’, the first time a proper beat drops on the album, it’s prefixed by swirling guitar lines, propelled through white noise drops before it emerges out into a sprawling exploration of moog textures. There really is a lot going on here, and that’s just on one song.
As a result it’s kind of hard to classify anything the band lays bare on +DOME. The moment you feel like they’ve locked into a groove, a song can change instantly and reapply the beat to something entirely different. I’ve read that they intended to make some strange that has listenable, radio friendly aesthetics and in a way, with the rich array of sounds and textures they’ve captured that. And in using the same kind of monumental bass and fingersnap snares as James Blake and or Mount Kimbie on beats like ‘Two’ and ‘Mingus’, Seekae manage to make their weirdness seem entirely normal, exploring varied melodic ideas on top of that bass foundation.
And in a sense that last sentence encapsulates the album. +DOME is a lot of things at once; from drone to click-step, synth chug to thug hip hop and soundtrack epic, there are a hundred different shades of ideas on show, but the real magic is in the way they tackle every electronic part with the same verve as they do the organic instrumentation. Creating an accomplished merger of the two, without ever disrupting the flow of that slow melancholia.
Anyway, we asked John Hassel from the band to give us an insight into a piece of work that means something to him; giving us a much more human interaction than the usual soundcloud stream. This is what he picked…
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Kettel – Whisper Me Wishes
“Kettel is an electronica/techno producer who hails from Groningen, Holland. He’s released close to 20 records in the space of a decade, and each one seems to hold its own place within the numerous genres thrown at him over the years. It’s not often that one record can switch between classical, hip-hop and techno, but ‘Whisper Me Wishes’ achieved this and effortlessly so.
“Tracks like ‘Now Find Another Moon’ and ‘And Unrequited As Well’ are ever-changing whilst maintaining a steady flow; just as you expect a heavy beat or bass line to enter, you’ll be surprised by a string section or a change in time signature. Kettel not only holds his ground as a brilliant composer, but a technically gifted producer, mixing and mastering many of his own records, a true sign of musical independence and originality.
“Although ‘Whisper Me Wishes’ hasn’t had a massive impact on the IDM scene internationally, it is a record that has shown true longevity and versatility with anyone I’ve known to hear it. Whether it will go unnoticed for much longer is uncertain, but it has had a tremendous impact on us as a band and individually as producers.” – John Hassel / Seekae
Seekae’s +DOME is out on the 13th December 2011.
