About a week and a half ago I started a new routine. This routine is strictly a middle-of-the-day-roommates-outta-the-house kind of thing. I lie on the couch with the headphones on, but with the stereo still cranked to the point that I can feel it through the floor and couch and hear the speakers spilling inside the headphones – big, studio quality headphones, not just some puny iPod earbuds.
Kangding Ray’s Automne Folde was the inaugural album in my new afternoon routine and it was a perfect candidate.David Letellier, aka Kangding Ray, has a glorious thumping rhythm aesthetic that transformed my couch into a hands-free massage table; the air woofing out of the back of the speakers became some sort of air purifying fan. It was a wholly relaxing and engulfing experience. Maybe this is the way one should enjoy a new album. I was so taken by this album that I immediately sought out and downloaded Letellier’s first Kangding Ray effort, Stabil (which then led me to find the new Byetone album, also on Raster Noton). I think of this as the tributary effect, where one album leads to another and another and so on; creating musical tributaries. But, back to the subject at hand.
Letellier certainly has found a signature sound for his Kangding Ray nom de plume, but there are some fascinating yet subtle shifts from Stabil to Automne Folde. On the latter, Letellier begins to employ the human voice as part of his array of sonic tools, a departure from the strictly instrumental makeup of Stabil. However, they are sparse (only a few tracks) and performed in such a way that barely allows the human voice to take center stage. The only way to describe these thinly diced pieces of vocals on “Downshifters” and “The Distance” is to compare them to “Fast Forward (Flowchart Mix)” by Lali Puna off of I Thought I Was Over That -- both almost as if the singer is constantly in a fit of hiccups while trying earnestly to talk anyways. Letellier’s disembodied hiccup-voice is much more haunting than Lali Puna’s though, a sort of skittery directive from someone beyond the grave. The other shift in style on this album is the heavy, Speedy J tidal wave synth washes (think circa Shocking Hobby) which fill out the ominous, lurking low end and give a breadth to the sound beyond the stripped-down Stabil. And even with that in mind, I couldn’t agree more with my buddy when he remarked that Kangding Ray makes Murcof sound huge and busy at times. But this simplicity, on the surface, is perfect for the effect it has on the listener and gives way to a much more complex emotional response and imagination.
As I have already alluded, the album lends itself to visions of apparitions; on “Altiz”, the underpinning synthesizer sounds like the uncomfortable straining of a ghost in the machine, a spirit caught in a horrendous routine of torture with the false promise of release. Many of Letellier’s selections for drum sounds bring to mind the deep ringing of the hull of an ocean liner long since sunk to the icy depths of the Atlantic: big, robust sounds buried in a vast watery grave. And then there is the repeated use of pinging sounds that make you anxiously await the explosion of some sonic bomb or the appearance of a ghost satellite rounding the moon – the coming of some end without really knowing how soon.
My descriptions may begin to sound almost negative in their darkness, but this is furthest from the truth. Automne Folde, which means “Fall Fold,” is beautiful for its austere nature and (imagined) foreboding tales of spirits trapped in mucky pockets of the endless ether. Maybe it represents the decay, the end, that Autumn comes to mean for deciduous trees or the hibernation of bears: the world folds in on itself as it goes to sleep or else dies before renewal can be arrived at.
In fact, the only thing I don’t like about this album is the artist’s name. I mean, every time I say Kangding Ray, I feel like I’m recounting the conflict in some special two-part episode of Star Trek and Ray is the antagonist that Shatner must duke it out with. To the keen reader, this may have been apparent by my refusal to use the artist name and instead constantly refer to Letellier himself. Dude, come up with a new name. Other than that, he's spot on.
-Gabriel Bogart