CORDELL KLIER

winter

CD, Ad Noiseam

It is getting cold. If you are easily frozen, don’t listen to this record, because it will lower the temperature of your room by at least two degrees Celsius. “Winter” is everything you might expect from an ambient-album with that title. But there is so much more, because Klier works hard on introducing glitches and clicks’n’cuts into ambient soundscapes. Which sounds great. You’ll never hear this one on radio, but you might hear it in your head when you get lost in a snowstorm in the mountains and suddenly the whole night turns calm. And you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

I have spent the better half of a day wondering about, what kind of person Cordell Klier might be. Now, that I have little more time on my hands, I like to ponder small things and seemingly less important matters like these. A trifle here, a trifle there, I shake them in my hand and mind and wait and see what they present. That way I have found, that, in getting deeper and more concentrated into one little aspect of something – a thought, a word, a sound, an idea – brings out a lot more than you might at the beginning expected to find in there. This meta-level is already an indicator towards Klier and his music. Short description given to possible customer: Deeply concentrated and refined, precise and open, vast ambient soundscapes and random glitches. Klier has left the question of harmony or sound far behind him, like early explorers drifting into the endless ice of the nordic seas. Some people might call this a headtrip, though finding spaces as cold as these in your own head might prove a little disappointing, especially under influence of certain drugs that make things and thoughts much more important than they are.

In my imagination, Cordell Klier is a big man, maybe wearing a beard but at least a stubble of facial hair, deeply introspective but energetic about the ideas and dreams he sets to himself. He is a person, that will follow an idea down into its deepest hole and explore it to the fullest. He is never hurried or puts pressure on people to fasten things up, because he knows that every thing has its own pace in which it might evolve and grow in the best manner. Like the beats and subtle rhythmical elements on “winter”, that grow from and vanish beneath the ambient sounds and synthie-layers. Like the slow wave-like, slow-motion movement of the dynamics of these layers of sounds. Like layer and layer and layer of sound creeping up, softly cloaking what has become before and muffling it like ten centimetres of freshly fallen snow. It is not only the title, the whole cold and cool atmosphere of this music forces everyone to bring in similes and comparisons that are all about coldness, winter and snow. Does anyone remember Origami Antarktika?

With the third track Klier introduces some harsher, bouncing techno-bass-beats into the equation of cuts’n’clicks and ambient soundscapes, but he, fortunately, keeps them way out of a straight pattern. As I hear, Klier builds all his tracks from original sounds, but more important, I guess, that he let himself influence a lot by the sounds of nature. The random symphonies produced by the wind and earth and everything built and living on it. Finally, “winter” is less radical than my words might make it appear. As soon as you let yourself drop, as a listener, into the ambient part of “winter”, you are on the safe side and might use this record as a medium to sleep better. If you tune your ears to the glitches and the beats, you might become over enjoyed by the sometimes sparse and regular drums and sounds, at other times be puzzled by the weirdness and randomness of them. The main point is, that Cordell Klier managed to put these ingredients together and thereby adding new flavours and pathways to the electronic landscape.

Next to that, it is the little things, the vast number of little ideas and sounds, worked into these tracks, that make them so good. There is a big difference between playing a note and then stopping and then playing again, and turning on the sound all the time and only putting the input levers to zero in the meantime. This difference, or the almost human-sounding, tiny bitparts of samples and other musical titbits, are what makes “winter” an outstanding album. Quality doesn’t come from extremities or using large amounts  of money. Quality comes from the heart and mind. True, “winter” is also an extreme album in the way in which Klier follows his ideas, without compromise and taking in all the consequences, good or bad. But this loyalty to the artists own vision and this hard work on making it sound right (where would it be more important than here) might be viewed as extreme, but not the outcome. Anyway, sounds and thoughts might be more than just related.

www.adnoiseam.net

11/2003