WOEBOT

THE KALLIKAK FAMILY
MAY 23rd 2007
TELL-ALL RECORDS

It's arguable that within electronica the margins for error are slight, without intuitive self-censorship and a superhuman musicality many recordings are doomed to grate. At once like like stand-up comedy and watercolour painting the forbiddingly solitary nature of the process and the practitioners slight arsenal mean that without alloying powers of collaboration (the trump card of genre and the reason behind the artistic success of as disparate units as Foul Play and Pansonic) there simply isn't enough tension in the music. Perhaps Andrew Peterson, himself misleadingly The Kallikak Family, must have realised this in enrolling the services of Phil Evrum, Adam Forkner and Liam Singer to augment his once solo offerings. As it turns out this isn't the only thing he got right.

The CD "May 23rd 2007" is named after a date for which a fortune-teller predicted Petersen's death, but there's nothing morbid about the songs here, which more often than not strike an elegaic tone. Most clearly exploring death and a notional afterlife is the excellent title track. Built on a strobing flurry of flamenco, pitched somewhere between vibration and tone and ruptured by interjections of taut machine-gun-spray drums haunted by the ghost of Drum and Bass "May 23rd 2007" breaks suddenly ("Second Phase") into a hallowed free-fall reminiscent of the abrupt shift between atomic frameworks in Can's "Chain Reaction" before regrouping in "Phase Three" for one of the record's more unusual sonic canvases in which sustained voices (think Eno's "Music for Airports") duel with splattering drums, Unique 3-era bleeps and a weirdly encumbered half-speed Reese bassline.

There are plenty of other highlights: The Vietnamese folk song of "Portland Oregon Part 2" punctuated by clangorous drones and machine-part rhythm and the snakily-tooled pluck drums and crisp metal clang of "Portland Oregon Part 4." Almost too many highlights to mention in fact. It's only a shame that Petersen's often sublime envelopes are ever so slightly lost in the fug of software synthesis. It'd be nice to hear some crisper, more trebly tones and a little more richness and depth.