Kaukolampi – Inside The Sphere

Optimo

K-X-P seems to have been on a hiatus since 2019’s IV and instead, Timo Kaukolampi has been concentrating on his solo efforts, with three albums released since 2020.

Here, for his second Optimo release, a few select friends join him in the studio to layer reeds and voices over his sinister, minimalist soundscapes. The list of electronics is a veritable treat for the synth head with Buchla, Roland, ARP, Eventide and Lexicon all making appearances, amongst others. Thankfully, due to the length of the pieces and Timo’s nature, the tracks are not bogged down but are finely wrought, each ingredient deftly handled to ensure the right atmosphere and sense of creeping space.

There is a submerged, muffled quality to opener “Inside the Sphere”, bringing to mind and abandoned submarine, the squelch of unseen things playing on your mind, lurking in the shadows. Lost aether voices and slow static calls that rumble and echo merge with a rhythmic pulse that is clear and precise in comparison to the prior murkiness. Mogadon techno for the hard of dancing, its insistence revealing a profundity that continues throughout the album.

The idea of a minimal techno backing to these slowly unravelling pieces runs through the album as if, rather like the last K-X-P album, the thrill of merging two disparate styles into one sort of homogenised whole is the real reason here. The fact that it isn’t entirely blended is what gives it that sinister, slightly removed feel. The listener is searching the airwaves for reminders of where they started, the hypnotic element of the pieces drawing your attention away with the background discord, gradually insinuating.

Refractions of sound feel familiar and you are forced to listen intently to make out the electronic messages that permeate the backdrop, deviant movements of air scattering memories across the sharp ambient drift and spacey emptiness of “/nɒˈstaldʒə/”, while the dystopian ecclesiastical tone of “Ee-Nni-Aa-Ssaa” is replete with the hidden vocalising of Aleksandra Babitizin and Ringa Manner.

Their plangent, disembodied tones are woven into a seething drone as more elements are added and subtracted, Eriikka Maalismaa adding portentous violin. It feels like a subtle battle for control, the different elements searching for the choicest moment to advance and then withdraw when the influence is felt.

This sense of disparate corners being plundered for unexpected sounds, varied sound files coalescing, the pulsebeat drawing on Helmi Malmgren‘s mournful clarinet and Eriikka’s violin; the juxtaposition of old and new ever-entangling at odds with the mechanoid beat at the heart of “The Mask Of sanity”. We visit the industrial zone in “Chrystal Desert”, lights flickering as deserted buildings flash by, the rhythm of wheel on pavement, the constant movement, the hyper modernity. A whole new discovery that is somehow removed from the surroundings, rendering them irrelevant.

Could it all be about the consideration of our place in the scheme of things? The drawing together of these ideas and textures giving a feeling of covering vast distances, the juxtaposition of near and far. There is always propulsion, smooth and rapid; yet the disturbing images that peer through windows are constant reminders of a mind in flux. The cover goes some way to putting a visual image to this mind and on the strength of this, you feel the exploration is ongoing and relentless.

-Mr Olivetti-