Prepare for the Worst

Julien Ash has released a series of albums on attenuation circuit in the last few years with his project Nouvelles Lectures Cosmopolites. In the trio KPA, he teams up with collaborators Klimperei and Frank Pahl to serve up a masterpiece of eerily beautiful „musique d’ameublement“ for a world in which only the furniture and other objects are left while the humans who made them are gone.

While a title like „The Proper Omelette“ could have come straight out of Erik Satie’s oeuvre, the music is more reminiscent of a Satie filtered through a Henry Partch sensibility – or, if you favour a more pop-oriented reference point, early Brian Eno reimagined by Tom Waits (post-Swordfishtrombones and minus the vocals).

This music is calm on the surface, and one tends to wonder why this rather beautiful music, of all things, would be suited to „preparing for the worst“, as the album title asks us to do. Perhaps it is because the music may be calm, but not necessarily relaxing. There’s an unsettling undercurrent that we are requested to come to terms with, and this exactly may be what prepares us for keeping our calm during the slow collapse we are facing, going down „not with a bang / but a whimper“ (T.S. Eliot).

File under: ambient