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CD Feature/ Cordell Klier: "Espionage"

  Tobias

Most artists strive for ever bigger gestures over the course of their career, but Cordell Klier’s output under his own name (as opposed to that of his endless list of pseudonyms) is mainly concerned with narrowing things down. “Espionage” is a great object for observing this theory in practise – its material ranging from between 2002 and 2006 -and therefore allows a look at certain constants and characteristic traits in his increasingly proliferating oeuvre.

While Klier also works as a Rock-Drummer and has spread his attention and enthusiasm over the most diverse genres, such as Dark Ambient, Drum n Bass, Power Electronics and a combination of Noise and Spoken Word, each of his projects on its own searches for refinement and clarity. For his solo output, the vision of a music made up of a duopol of drones and glitches has grown from a surreal, frightening fever dream to a dancing sceleton of electro, ambient and even hiphop. The titles on “Espionage” could hardly be more reduced, four to five elements defining individual tracks and engaging in endlessly evolving interactions, dialogues, trialogues and confrontation. In the background, menacing atmospheres raise and lower their voice, while high-pitched bleeps, blops, click and nanosecond cuts of 1001 records initiate grooves, structures, parasitic frequencies and their own demise. The entire horizon is funneled through this telescopic view, destilling the two fundamental ingredients of music: Sound and rhythm. Even though the occasional vocal sample or astoundingly concrete four to the floor bassdrum impulse may suggest human involvement, Klier’s world is essentially a Microcosm hidden in the chinks of our reality. Looked at it from the outside, it is smooth, seemless and coherent and takes the listener through a clever psychologic panopticum, starting with unresolved, open states which melt into warmer, more dense pieces with a relaxed flow and finally free floating mood pieces. Maybe, however, a music made up of so many seperate chunks ripped out of their original context needs to be listened to with as little space between it and the listener as possible. Under the shileded dome of one’s headphones, the dissected nature of these short and yet spaceous compositions becomes much clearer: You can suddenly hear the seems between samples, appreciate the tiny nuances in their recording environment, discover the conjunction between outwardly disparate fragments.

This may sound complicated, but in reality it is everything but. “Espionage”’ can be seen as an offer to enter its different layers and higher degrees of complexity, which you can either accept or refuse. “No song titles, enjoy” Klier recommends on the back cover. It is that simple, really.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Cordell Klier at MySpace
Homepage: Cordell Klier at DoctSect
Homepage: Gears of Sand Records