kyo: aktuel musik

Aktuel Musik is the second release from Danish duo Kyo (Hannes Norrvide and Frederik Valentin). Following their 2016 Posh Isolation debut, Potentiel Musik, Aktuel Musik presents eight pieces of emotive and luminesced experimentation. Utilizing electronics, acoustic motifs, and aching instrumentation for -- most prominently -- woodwind and piano, Kyo softly unfold the structures that bind their work to the many genres being addressed. Romantic synth lines submerge free jazz drumming, playfully scattering an appeal to the cerebral in the sensuous. The most brilliant aspect of this lies in one of the record's most pointed qualities: the incredibly subtle use of dissonance, which compresses the enveloping sense of introspection in Aktuel Musik into diamond form. The whispered field recordings corral the moments of listless instrumentation into snapshots of a cosmic metropolis. This is most keenly felt in the orchestral swells that fall away to reveal a soloist on a decaying pedestal, improvising their fate.