The year of blue continues: blue art, blue music, blue moods. Klara Lewis‘ Opening is an azure version of the hue, twisting and turning like permutations seen beneath varying degrees of light.
The first single and opening track “Ta Min Hand” establishes the baseline from which the album will drift, like a small vessel upon the sea. Even the music includes waves. A sweet melody emerges, loops and abrades. In “City,” solo piano plays over the sounds of traffic and conversation, momentarily pausing as if to listen to the other acoustic sources. Suddenly a more aggressive set of sounds conquers the sonic field, a helicopter of rovers and gears. The piano reenters, insistent, then the conversation, posing questions about where the attention turns in an economy of sonic competition. The more orchestral “Vaknar” (“Waking”) attempts to soothe, but the ground has already proven unstable. The looping continues, but the volume increases.
Opening revels in juxtaposition and incremental shift. “Feel” and “Drip” were composed for Mika Taanila’s expressive film “Failed Emptiness,” which toys with expectations of light. As the album’s most abrasive piece, “Feel” stands in contrast to the melodies that haunt the earlier selections. The brief “Drip” is its polar opposite, nearly a dance piece, restricted only by its length, the connecting tissue a feedback drone emerging toward the end. “Tide,” by far the album’s longest piece at 11:37, is dedicated to Christine Ödlund’s painting “Dissolving Strawberry,” and is also on a compilation EP that finds connections between pigment and tone.
While listening, one gleans melodies through gauze, origins obscured like fragments of forgotten lyrics. By “How Far?” abstraction begins to win over form, Lewis’ voice suddenly emerging in the center as another instrument. Furthering the sense of inversion, the set closer is called “Opening,” making one wonder if the title may mean an opening, such as a pathway or door; or the sense of opening one’s self to unpredictability or the divine. By the time the album ends, one has been led down multiple pathways, and even the trail of string has become tangled. To find one’s bearings, one must return to the beginning or plunge further into the unknown. (Richard Allen)
a closer listen 