Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Through The Red Frame:


Every once in a while a record comes along that exists in it's own space of time. It cares not for genre pigeonholes or attention seeking status; it just pops up, does what it does, and slowly creeps into your corner and life and stays.

I've been living with this KOPERNIK album for years and it still has a powerful affect on me. It's a perfectly realized, concise vision of what benefits the careful listener can gain by exposure to true meaningful sound.

There are elements of electronic, chamber music, post rock, ambient, but those elements are more like tiny fragments. It's almost as if the Kopernik duo took some records back to their laboratory and dissected each one into tiny molecular pieces and chose not the pieces themselves, but the DNA from those pieces to structure one hell of a beautiful album. There is a very minimal approach to each number here; simple and subtle. Yet, this stuff is quite complex in how it is harmonically composed. Themes are quietly and purposefully stated, they are never overblown, yet those themes are lush in texture, space, and colour. Sometimes, I imagine these pieces more as work on a frame, rather than the picture itself. A work around the details of the outer edge; an open sided boundary to put the art in context rather than category. One may be able to discover cinematic themes here as well...and here is where the observant listener can pinpoint a big difference between ideas of "soundtrack" and "cinema."

Kopernik is an underrated album full of a slow blooming wonder; and one whose beauty is revealed through multiple listens.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please re-post Are You Shakesperienced, or i'll go crazy and drive to the crack in the earth!

icastico said...

Kopernik is really a great find. Really really good. Really.

Jack Celliers said...

Wundaful! Didn't know these guys, they sound very avant-garde but without that annoying pretentious insistence of many bands alike. Everything is perfectly justified and graceful.

Thanks!

Jack Celliers said...

Do you know the year of this issue?

Black Phillip said...

Awesome. Very listen-able, which is sometimes hard to do with this type of music.

alex.ookpik said...

Jeebus. This is honestly the best thing I've hear in... I don't know how long. Thank you so much for posting.