kailin: fracture

Beneath's Mistry label explores post-club dimensions with Kailin's debut album featuring eight tracks of hazy hooks, engulfing subs, and grimy thizz rent in acres of space. Beneath describes it perfectly as "uplifting whilst also being dread filled..." Much of the appeal of electronic music lies within the listener's ability to divine meaning from abstraction, often according to their own cultural conditioning. Kailin's enigmatic debut album of suggestive, dread-filled atmospheres and elusive, noise-sculpted rhythms, collected on Fracture, is essentially fueled on this notion and perfectly resonates with the aesthetics and ideals conveyed by Beneath's Mistry label. Making up the first LP release on Mistry after seven club-hinging EPs from the likes of Batu, Laksa, Chevel, and Webstarr, Kailin's Fracture occupies an introspective middle-distance between perceptions of club and ambient modes of reception by disintegrating dancefloor structures into a near-metaphysical presence with mercurial, vaporizing gestures. Like Schrödinger's cat in a bassbin, it's neither or, and possibly both at the same time, depending on your perception. This paradoxical sense of simultaneous detachment and immersion perhaps stems from the album's production; originally sketched out in a two month haze, then left to steep for much longer, before the collection's nuances and conflicting elements began to reveal themselves in remarkable formations such as the out-of-body-experience electro flex of "Circling" or the midnight quantum jazz dynamics of "Gimp", or a really big highlight in the teetering, polymetric ambient pop of "Respite". No doubt it's a fascinating and quintessential turn for Mistry, one which lives up to the label's name and its roots in the duppie dread effect of UK soundsystem culture, yet never previously revealed by Beneath's imprint in such absorbing and heady style before now. RIYL: Lee Gamble, Arca, Vangelis. Mastered by Matt Colton. Edition of 500.