KELPE – streams album in full ahead of it’s release tomorrow! – Listen HERE

KELPE - streams album in full ahead of it's release tomorrow! - Listen HERE

With new album ‘The Curved Line’ out this week, Kelpe aka McKeown is streaming the record in full ahead of it’s release on Friday via DRUT Recordings. Kelpe is set to play a London at The Waiting Room on Sept 17th. The Curved Line’ is arguably Kelpe’s most urgent record yet; it’s a mature soundworld full of glowing club experiments, bounding chords and mellow interludes. Kelpe’s warm electronics are more heightened then ever before & underpinned with an array of analogue synths, skittish surprises and white noise.

Kelpe also recently created an exclusive mix for THUMP, which you can listen to here.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/107841476″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

A natural son and heir to Generation Warp and the fathers of Krautrock, Kelpe’s pioneering experiments in the early ’00s positioned him as one of many stylistic precursors to the arrival of LA’s now-sprawling beat scene. Much like scene-savants Prefuse 73 and Dimlite, Kelpe has remained an enormously respected stalwart of the fringes, always dabbling variously in sample-heavy beat-craft, oddball ambient, and – more recently – dancefloor-ready club grub.

Kelpe returns to grace his still-young imprint DRUT RECORDINGS with ‘The Curved Line’. It’s a record transfixed on tonality and texture – Korgs, Moogs and pocket pianos all feature heavily across the album’s rich palette. The exciting sonic bursts of his last effort have evolved confidently and blown out into soaring progressions and flowing structures – all evidence of a tireless producer gunning to out-do himself.

As ever, Kelpe presides over a delicate union of the electronic and the organic. ‘Chirpsichord’ is a neat embodiment of the album’s openers – a loping slice of soft bubbling arpeggios and shifting loops. ‘Calumet’ runs harder with the same themes – driving loops into a club headspace clapped with big drums and droning synths. The record pauses for breath here and there, shoehorning skittish sound experiments like ‘Red Caps of Waves’ and the delicately exotic ‘Morning Two’. After tosses and surprise turns, the album finishes dramatically on ‘Incantation’ – a thumping beat workout followed by a deep and whirring coda that seems only achievable if you’ve been noodling with sound hardware for over a decade.

See Kelpe live:

Sept 17th – The Waiting Room, LONDON

‘The Curved Line’ tracklist:
1. Doubles of Everything
2. Chirpsichord
3. Calumet
4. Sick Lickle Thing
5. Red Caps of Waves
6. Valerian
7. Drums For Special Effects
8. Morning Two
9. Canjealous
10. Incantation

Xsnoize Author
Mark Millar is the founder of XS Noize and looks after the daily running of the website as well as hosting interviews for the weekly XS Noize Podcast. Mark's favourite album is Achtung Baby by U2.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*