TRISTEN KASTEN-KRAUSE, the intensely collaborative dronescaper who’s all set to release his debut album come late April, has dropped some beautifully tailored visuals to accompany his second teaser for that record – you can watch that below.
“From Thin Air” follows the delicious drones of “Dawn Looming”, his first reveal from late last month; a piece which at the time we were moved to call “a delight of longform sustain, deep bass surge, music for a new day.”
“From Thin Air” is something more stark and melancholy. Made of fluid hums, the track is brimming with a nostalgia that resonates with a resignation born by the bass’s echoing harmonies. On this track he’s collaborated with Lisel, who’s herself about to release a spaciously retrotronic album with Booker Stardrum.
The two musicians live on opposite sides of the country – Bagg in Los Angeles, Kasten-Krause in New York – but here, they make music as if they’re in the same room, obliterating distance through their intimate performance. The music they make captures the bittersweet, ephemeral nature of life.
“From Thin Air” has a lachrymose vocal front and centre, by turns Sigur Rós, Arvo Pärt; sad, but delicately so, high, grand passion of a modern classical nature, notes falling and faltering, returning. It’s grandly human, is this track. For my money, there’s still very much a euphoria in the power and capabilities of the human voice to evoke, our first instrument of expression.
The accompanying video was made using more than 200 still photographs and video taken in Iceland by artist Chris Cubellis, which were then run through AI software by directors John Syzonenko and Charles Gangemi to create hyperreal, augmented landscapes.
Although musically very different, the way the landscape film plays out very much puts me in mind of Max Cooper’s pulsing “Swarm”; play the two side by side for an interesting resonance.
Tristan says of the album and the track we’e hearing today: “Potential Landscapes is an album that creates sound-worlds in between real and imagined space, in the hopes of creating alternate space during a time of shared physical isolation.
Creating these dream landscapes from actual places is a visual embodiment of the record’s sonic concepts.
“My collaborative music is an outgrowth of relationships with the performers involved, interpersonally as well as musically, and “From Thin Air” is cathartic music based on shared loss. The name has a double meaning, something can either disappear from thin air, or emerge from thin air – it’s the bittersweet space we are inhabiting right now.”
Tristan Kasten-Krause’s Potential Landscapes will be released digitally and on CD and vinyl by Whatever’s Clever Records on April 23rd; each LP comes with a handpainted rainbow. You can pre-order your copy now at Tristan’s Bandcamp.
