Living rurally, it doesn’t take much effort to quickly get to places that feel unique. One place has over time, been named somewhat unimaginatively by me, as ‘the corner’. Little more than a sharp 90 degree turn in the forest path next to the edge of a huge field. It’s nothing remarkable in any traditional sense but has always felt like some sort of strange destination rather than just another part of the route.
Clearly this notion of oddly significant places blurs into the idea of liminality. Liminal spaces, architecturally or spatial, are, considered to be transitional. Corridors, stairways, hallways, roads, carparks, often devoid of people, that function like the threshold between other places.
It’s a concept that also informs kraftwitch’s album LIMINAL HOME. Clearly framed by the title, each track depicts a space of sorts, a grouping of sound processing and scene setting. Initially the 12 tracks feel like an adventurous mix or compilation, the underlining concept not immediately apparent.
kraftwitch is the project of Philadelphia based artist John Moletress. The debut album, a result of field recordings, geo-location information converted into musical sequences, custom software and electronics gather into an exhilarating mish mash of places, memories, and textures.
The opener, I threw my heart into the sea is a loose gathering of subtle and sleepy electronics, 1990 is a marginally more animated refracting passage of sound. Jupiter’s tiled floor is like a muffled cityscape, off kilter church bells and the soft roar of distant traffic, whilst, The singing oak is glassy water droplets under some forest canopy.
By this point it would be easy to assume the album will play out in a pleasant ambient fog. But, quite unexpectedly Layette Square, complete with odd, vocalised beats and skewed jazzy fragments somehow totally animates. A house between worlds feels vast as ghostly drones spin and mesh in filmic sweeps, before giving way to the abstracted percussion of The singing oak II.
Several times in numerous listens, the music has been lost in background noise, dipped out of view, only to reappear, its twisted path somehow impossible to follow. So, the rhythms of Berlin somehow feel both completely logical and amusingly incongruous. We aren’t in some night club; we are travelling through that space whilst also pleasantly disconnected from it. No pets allowed on the playground takes things even further, thumping beats pecked at by vectored layers and razor-sharp pixels.
When the birds sing of is another sharp hairpin bend, another wall stepped through, as a sonically exposed eavesdrop on some heartfelt voicemail message, a mystery around lost love… Not sure what to make of it anymore is a slow alignment of Wurlitzers and fairgrounds lights. The closing 8 minutes of Aquarius moon unpicks itself into a huge warm smudge of bird songs and heat haze gathering into both forlorn and excited strings.
When LIMINAL HOME finally trails off into silence after 51 minutes, its 12 tracks somehow never quite fit neatly in the memory. It’s literally stuffed with signposted, reflections, interference and surprise at every corner. Some tracks, taken in insolation feel like perfectly accomplished in a host of genres.
But somehow, rather than a crazy grouping of totally incompatible elements, LIMINAL HOME is united by something far less superficial. Each of these tracks could be seen as corridors that join other things together. They are all the result of letting ideas breathe, open eyed experimentation where stylistic surfaces are allowed to thrive, and welcoming whatever they yield or lead to…
The numerous twists and turns highlight that certain tracks might appeal more but despite the vast range on display, LIMINAL HOME is a superb and hugely repeatable whole album experience.
Whatever playful framework the album suggests LIMINAL HOME is an album to treat as a destination. An album that somehow offers way more that you may have initially thought. A richly layered experience, dripping in intrigue, perfectly poised between the almost non-existent, the conceptual and ecstatic.
Liminal Home is out now on Three Wands Records, available as a limited edition cassette and digitally here
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