lokai » 7 million
artist: lokai
title: 7 million
label: mosz ,
2005 (CD – mosz 006)Florian Kmet: guitar
Stefan Németh: electronics, additional guitarsrecorded by lokai
mixed by Martin Siewert
“Lokai’s debut album continues a brilliant run of form for the Mego-allied Mosz label. This Austrian duo, comprising Florian Kmet and Stefan Németh, centre their spare, measured explorations on the many sounds of the electric guitar: leaving openended arpeggios hanging in elegantly distressed space and garlands of feedback intertwined with fiendishly processed electronic noise. The juxtaposition of unhinged sonics with professional attention to detail is invigorating throughout – check out the molten, wayward electricity smeared wantonly across the stark, monochrome spaces of “Taora Atoll”, or the interplay between the swelling skeins of guitar and the measured sub-bass modulations on “Hellen”. The album’s centrepiece is the sprawling, multidimensional “Chuuk”, a rolling, gathering cloud of amorphous sound, which thickens gradually from almost nothing to a piercing climax before subsiding like slo-mo skyscraper demolition into fraught, tense silence. Not easy listening but enthralling all the same.” [Wire – n.260, reviewed by Chris Sharp]“In lokai’s music tunes and tones merge and diverge. Guitar and software combine in compositions that stray to and fro across the borders between analogue and digital, structure and instability, music and sound. Parts of songs – loops, melodies, chords – float like moody jellyfish in electronic space. musical threads fly apart and reconvene in unresolved clusters. There«s always another twist of the kaleidoscope to come. With ears sharpened in Vienna, Stefan Németh and Florian Kmet carry their musical baggage lightly, edging their work into thickly textured explorations of states of uncertainty. The old advice still holds good: play loud.” [Will Montgomery]
