- A dense but beautiful collaboration between two producers finding the space where daydreams and nightmares meet.
- In his review of Klara Lewis' 2016 album, Too, Angus Finlayson described her music as creating "a dreamlike sound that ought to be comforting to listen to, but is often distressing." It's a description I kept coming back to while listening to Lewis' collaboration with Peder Mannerfelt, KMNOPQ. Although Mannerfelt's take on techno often balances mischief with menace, you can hear the ethereal slip into something more sinister on a track like "Styrofoam Tone" from their debut EP together. The vocal loop and pulsing chords have a lullaby-like quality, but the vocals shift into screams as the chords violently warp out of tune. The rest of the record is just as dense, as the two producers create kaleidoscopic universes where the colors and emotions shift with each rotation.
Take "You Need to Be Kind." It starts out with an almost Dilla-style boom bap beat before drifting into ambient daydreams, climaxing with a carnivorous reverb finale. "Full Of Piss And Vinegar" is no less complex. A mariachi melody is looped under a nearly arhythmic percussive stutter and wispy feedback that has a trip-hop edge to it. "Selling Art" is a bit more focused, but even as the most delicate track on the record the tape delay shrouding the gossamer thin melodic loop feels flecked with a pervasive sense of anxiety, if not violence.
While the majority of this record is focused on these types of ambient soundscapes crafted out of impressionistic and processed loops and samples, you can hear Mannerfelt's dance music background sneak in as well. Lately, Mannerfelt has been making some of the most straight-up techno of his career on labels like Voam and Seilscheibenpfeiler (although he still gets a chance to excise his more experimental demons with his band Roll the Dice). And we get a touch of that techno saffron on my favorite track, "My Clementine Is Making Paella Tonight," where a semi-regular kick drum gradually winds its way into the track (but full warning to any curious DJs: you are going to have a hell of a time mixing out if you let it play past the five-minute mark). It's on moments like these that the record brims with the full potential of what happens when two of Sweden's most exciting artists spend some time playing with machines.
Tracklist01. Sell Art
02. My Clementine Is Making Paella Tonight
03. Styrofoam Tone
04. You Need To Be Kind
05. Full Of Piss And Vinegar