There's an amazing sense of restraint at play on the debut disc by
Klang, an essentialist trio based in London, who play their spartan
tunes with the sort of deadpan reductionism that marked the fleeting
career of Young Marble Giants a quarter-century ago. But where the YMG
three were always kept on the straight and narrow by a marching-in-time
drum machine, Klang have Zen-like Keisuke Hiratsuka on "drums," and, in
the spirit of the combo's barely-there aesthetic, he's happy enough to
work with the tiniest reminders of rhythm, capriciously shifting to
different parts of his kit and working, with focus, on building beats
from the most basic building-blocks: just quietly tapping at a single
cymbal, randomly plonking at some detuned tuned-percussion, or keeping a skeletal song anchored with the simple stomp of a bass drum.
Hiratsuka's playing is at the center of Klang's minimalist sound, where his
rudimentary rhythm-keeping is regularly draped in metronomic guitar
harmonics, and a bass-guitar pulse that seems to beat only every other
bar, this topped off with murmured singing whose hushed syllables are
oft delivered like deadpan incantations. I've often thought of
Quix*o*tic — the gently-gothic rock-trio headed by punk/soul sisters
Christina and Mira Billotte — as being prime examples of reductionist
rock 'n' roll, boiling things down to the bare-bones underneath all the
pressed flesh and needless accoutrements of regulation rock. But Klang
take things much, much further, their gentle distillation of the
essential making their slightly-built songs sit somewhere between a
moody pop-tune and a Rothko canvas.
On their debut album, No Sound Is Heard, the trio deliver nine of these
Zen-like numbers, working with
such a stringent palette that an actual drum-beat — like on "Help Is on
Its Way" — or the triggering of a solitary electro-tonal sample — like
on
"Good and Evil," or the appropriately named "We Step Softly" — seems like
some sort of bombast. In this, the disc clocks in at just a shade under 27 minutes,
and it's all so bashful — in its arrangements, packaging, and running time — that
it almost seems too frail to survive in the orgiastic rock-revivalist
hype-machine that is the current British music scene. Its title almost
seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy: when you play this quietly, and
don't play the rock-biz game, no sound will be heard.
Yet, the great irony is that the driving force behind all their musical minimalism
is
Donna Matthews, formerly of Elastica. The significance of this may not
translate to audiences outside of the UK who weren't subjected to the
daily gossip-rag updates of Damon and Justine, Brit-pop's King and
Queen, but Matthews herself was often splashed across tasteless pages
after a nasty 1997 falling out with Justine Fleischmann that threatened to
kill Elastica for good. Her mere presence makes Klang notable in
England, but, so far, Matthews has kept her little trio firmly out of
the musical spotlight, preferring to let their gentle music speak for
itself. The volume and pace Klang operate at, then, is just a way
to make sure that you're really listening.
|
