Departing from the Enovian principle of Ambient as functional room tint or affordance structure for relaxation, LUXE exhibits the genre’s stylistic richness, not to mention latitude, in its questing navigation through diverse sounds and states.
Roiling drones across a cosmic soundstage
The end of 2021, four years after debut A Handful of Dust Is a Desert, saw the return of Hannu Karjalainen to Berlin’s Karaoke Kalk with a new audio-visual work, LUXE. With two more LPs in between, the last, Railo, on Helsinki’s Signature Dark early in 2021, the Finnish sonician draws further on the affective resonance of ambient and soft noise. Departing from the Enovian principle of Ambient as functional room tint or affordance structure for relaxation—‘sleeping pill designed to maintain the status quo,’ as the artist puts it, LUXE exhibits the genre’s stylistic richness, not to mention latitude, in its questing navigation through diverse sounds and states.
‘I wanted the music to reflect all kinds of feelings without constraint, from dreams to nightmares, from dread and despair to hope,’ says Karjalainen. The main driver for the album and related self-produced videos is a question: whether the ability to create art in times when the world is literally burning is to be seen as luxury or necessity—fueling reflection on the disasters unfolding around us. It is, though, not so much about the search for a notional answer as the provision of an affordance structure, ‘a long question mark,’ as he puts it, ‘to further ponder on our relationship with nature and the delusion of infinite economic growth through sometimes surreal scenes and visual experimentation.’
From opener “A Hidden Star”’s blend of distant vox with roiling drones across a cosmic soundstage, LUXE feels too maximalist for containment within the Ambient (Capital ‘A’) tag. Even superficially winsome tracks like “Fish in the Afternoon,” are imbued with latent, emergent, eeriness. The video for another, “Silkworms” (see below), clearly points the programmatic element with names of recently extinct species abstracted so as to be illegible—symbolic of the disturbance of biodiversity occurring unnoticed before our eyes. The second half’s opening lush bright synth is deceptive, as “Industry Standard” turns to distorting mirror, noise layers semiotically reflecting the absurdity of the accumulation processes shaping our society. And the title track’s initial pacific tenor is gradually abraded, though barely preparing us for “Rutistus”’s chilly blast of jittery rhythm and sound. After this sudden outburst, the closing “x7” backs us into a frosty Köner with sombre drones and treated field captures. An ending of sorts nods to resolution, though the oblique unease of the whole sets a tone of ambivalence that prevails. Overall, though, LUXE is an affecting, and effective, work that seeks no switch-off soundtrack, but active engagement with a world beyond its signifying palette.
LUXE is available on Karaoke Kalk. [Bandcamp]
