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Electronic music can sometimes feel hemmed in, especially the kind intended to make you dance. But artists like Britain’s K-Lone have a different intention, and are by design less focused.
What he does exceptionally well is invest his music with a sense of personality.
I kept coming back to K-Lone’s second album Swells because it gives a good sense of the man behind it: playful, a bit silly, someone whose music tickles your ears and prompts you to lean in closer.
This can be hard to do, and is often not the desired effect. Acoustic elements can be used to humanise your sound, but most of this album sounds straight out of the box. It’s in his choices of rhythm and musical syntax that he makes himself felt.
A few years ago I had K-Lone’s first album Cape Circa on high rotation, and embarrassingly, I spent a few months with this one before realising it was the same artist. That record is entirely different, with a focus on tuned percussion like marimba and xylophone, synthesised and otherwise, as well as digital birdsong.
By contrast, Swells is much more insular, but retains a certain effervescence.
That’s British singer and DJ Eliza Rose adding vocals to the track ‘With U’. Even though it’s mostly drum machine, synth, and echoed snatches of her voice, I find it deeply nostalgic, my mind wandering to days spent on a porch in the sun.
First track ‘Saws’ pulls a neat musical trick, opening on dissonant layered vocal samples, before the electronic elements creep in around them, bringing warmth and eventually an element of cuteness.
The tone of naivety that K-Lone hits on that track reminds me of the German label Morr Music, who frequently achieved similar results in the mid 2000s.
He co-runs his own label, called Wisdom Teeth, with a roster of comparable artists making electronic music that sounds fun and unfussed over.
There was a certain period when musicians like this were critiqued if their sounds were too unproduced, but I think that’s gone away as electronic instruments have aged, and gained their own pedigree. Swells is full of music that clearly came out of a computer, but is no less human for it.
