(09.10.07) David Newman trails releases on his Audiobulb Records as “Exploratory Electronic Music,” and it’s no empty sloganeering. Simon Kealoha’s third album as Calika – sequel to first Audiobulb outing, Small Talk Kills Me, and Benbecula bash, The Bright Spot – certainly fits the questing bill. Whether or not its explorations bear a yield of resonance, however, is a question of the listener’s preferred orientation in terms of musical textures and compositional strategy. Kealoha operates with a pointillist palette, melding particulate matter gradually into larger shifting shapes, invariably organically inclined, often with a faux-live sound. Though it wears its electronic skeleton on the outside at times, copious use is made of acoustic instruments. Much musical matter is a freeplay of piano innards, harps, mouth organs, displaced voices guitar, and piano rubbing up against real drums and toybox-type percussives, sometimes dusted with found sounds. Bass guitar is also frequently prominent, leading to Calika sometimes taking on an air of a more dissipated cousin of German post-everythingists To Rococo Rot. Seedling Mother‘s rhythms are spidery leggy things with little whomp or thunk – brittle things that seem to resist repetition, even regularity, ever prone to straying away from much trodden toe-tap and head-nod paths. And melody is also a fleeting entity within Kealoha’s wonky semi-structured version of freeform/improv methodology allied to glitch-inflected electronica, nearest kindred spirit here being the likes of Portland eclecticists, Run_Return.
Album opener “No Hope But Everything” is all dissipative tonalities and an assertive bass guitar slathering themselves over a shifting glitch-hop backdrop, while the subsequent “rep}eat Performance” finds acoustic guitar, bass, and unidentified sounding objects finally cohering into a more somatic beat, counteracting a prevailing feel of nervy types jamming in a virtual rehearsal-room. Truth be told, though Audiobulb flaunts its electronicity, Calika’s sound strikes as less an affair of digital circuitry than of circuitous fidgetry. On the 11-minute centrepiece, “Mute,” a different constellation of sounds emerges, resonant synth pings and a more pared back acoustic backdrop conspiring to establish an atmosphere approaching serenity, a more immersive ambient piece, flirting, in its extended fade-out, with liminality. The finale “Fused” starts out as a sister piece, though it breaks into the electro-fidgeting and post-rock action once more. It’s those less nervous moments, where fret-fiddle, patter and paradiddle are deferred, that show a side to Calika’s sound that would merit more extended exploration.
Ultimately, Seedling Mother signals significant movement forward from the somewhat stylistically disparate hodgepodge of Small Talk Kills Me, though the sub-genre pick’n’mix approach is still present. It does, however, offer a different take on an increasingly familiar blend, ambient rubbing shoulders with post- (and neo-math) rock, techno, and IDM, and it must be said that, though its fragment-strewn loose-limbed compositions do not tweak this listener’s ear-drums particularly, Kealoha has achieved a more coherent and cohesive blend with a clearer sense of individual voice on Seedling Mother than on previous outings.
Seedling Mother is out now on Audiobulb. [Purchase]
