Kloba Kent - Naked in the Storm

Listeners to my Dandelion Radio show will be familiar with the work of Diane Marie Kloba, who I was pleased to see gracing the Festive Fifty for the second time in 2016 and whose marvellous recent session for my show can now  be purchased as NYP here. 

 

Now, Diane has teamed up with Brighton-based guitarist Paul Kent to release this EP, which you can get from his Exploding Galaxy bandcamp page.  It's a fascinating release. Diane is such a singular vocalist that it's intriguing to hear what the addition of a collaborator can add to her work.

If you heard my Dandelion show last month, when I played the track 'Fools Like Walls', you'll already be aware of the extra dimension Paul Kent's spacious guitar lines bring to her unique style.  This month I'll be featuring the title track, where the guitar work provides a fine backdrop to a vocal performance that, even for Diane, is pretty damn breath-taking.

Overall, the collaboration works like a dream.  Worth checking out too Paul's earlier work while you're at his bandcamp site and, if you still remain unacquainted with Diane's back catalogue, I'd advise you to address that with some urgency by visiting her website here.

Diane Marie Kloba - Ghost in the Museum

It's been well over two and a half years since we last heard an album from Diane Marie Kloba, the excellent 'It's is All an Illusion', so inevitably news of this new collection was greeted with a keen sense of anticipation.

I certainly haven't been disappointed.  The warmth and intimacy that lay very much beneath the surface in her last album is much more prominent here.  There's an emotional honesty that gives her a clearer musical voice on Ghost in the Museum and perhaps this will bring the broader attention her music so richly deserves.

Thankfully, that's not diminished the angular quality that makes Diane such a unique artist.  'Ancient Art', the album's opener, works as a title track of sorts, enticing us into the museum and 'making you imagine what you never knew you knew'.  Which is as good a description of her music as you'll get: in Kloba's hands, ancient pre-existing musical notes are dragged into the world and twisted into new, enticing shapes.  'The answer is already in your mind' we're reminded in 'A Thousand Pretty Strings', one of the album's many highlights.

Among the tracks here are two re-workings of tunes Diane recorded in session for my Dandelion Radio show in July 2014. One of these, 'Rescued', features in my show this month.   It's significant, perhaps, that the track then was called 'Rescue': the past tense here allowing it to pick up again on the album's theme of reclamation, this time via a rush of remembered images of a perfect love glimpsed, clasped and ultimately given powerful new life via memory.

 

You don't just listen to a Diane Marie Kloba album: you live with it and absorb it. The reason there's a danger of that sounding like pretentious bollocks is that we're so familiar with artists who declare that kind of intent invariably failing to live up to their own professed vision.  Kloba makes no such claims: the music does the talking and the pointed whisper of Ghost in the Museum is the most beautiful articulation we've heard from it yet.

Get it as CD or download here. 

Mister Lies - Mowgli

Only just realised that this is my second post on a Chicago-based musician in a matter of weeks.   Not that there's much else, on the face of it, that's similar about the Diane Marie Kloba album and this, an electronic masterpiece from the Lefse label.  Beneath the surface, though, there's a common throbbing vein of experimentalism and a desire to probe and manipulate unconventional sonic soundscapes that makes the two releases fascinating a comparable with little else I've heard recently.

Admittedly this doesn't tell us anything at all about Chicago, but it does reveal something about Mister Lies, who released a whole raft of singles and EPs throughout 2012, most of which I've only just caught up with: all of them offered strands of enticing musical ideas that have built up to this, an eight track masterpiece that on the strength of only a few listens muscled its way into my top ten albums of 2013 (so far) list last month.

Now, you're about to hear (assuming you tune in) Mister Lies, the alias of producer/artist Nick Zanca, on my Dandelion Radio show for the first time, streaming from tomorrow at various times through the month, starting with an 11am (UK time) broadcast on Easter Monday.  That I've chosen 'Dionysian' to play from the album may be considered a little strange given my show's insatiable penchant for the new - this track, after all, came out as a single some five months ago.  There's a simple reason for this: the track's an absolute stormer and I'm angry at myself for not having played it sooner, so its appearance here gives me an opportunity to rectify that and also give you the best possible introduction to this fine album.

Not that you should stop with 'Dionysian', of course.  Other highlights on Mowgli include the expansive opener 'Ashore' and the evocative 'Hounded', which features a gorgeous vocal performance from Aleksa Palladino.  'Canaan', a mere snippet of a track at less than two minutes, manages to cram more into its truncated length than other artists could find in five times the length.  To say that it, like the rest of the album, punches above its weight is a massive understatement.

As with other tracks on the album, 'Canaan' draws on a guest performance, in this case a vocal and field recording courtesy of Julia Rose Duray.  I'm slightly ashamed to say I know little about Zanca's collaborators here, but he's clearly a man with perfect judgement because each contributor offers something slightly unique to every track while not detracting even slightly from the project as a whole.

Get a copy of Mowgli here and, while you're at it, bookmark the page and keep checking back.  Something this good has got to have plenty more to say in the future, and you're doing to want to hear it.

Diane Marie Kloba - I Am An Unknown Artist

Chicago-born poet and performer Diane Marie Kloba first announced herself to my ears when she contributed backing vocals to a track on Laurence Made Me Cry's fabulous The Dairy of Me album.   Which means that, thankfully, she's no longer an unknown artist to me and inevitably the title of this collection becomes an immediate anachronism as soon as you hear it.

That's just the first of many little tricks the release has up its sleeve.  For a start, the list of Kloba's influences on her website didn't prepare me at all for what to expect.   Citing Dylan and Wilco alongside Radiohead and Arcade Fire led me to anticipate something in a singer songwriter vein accompanied by arch and intelligent musicianship, underplaying expectations of the creativity that lurks in every crevice of this release.

Thankfully, the album soars well beyond such influences so that any genuine source of inspiration is undetectable beneath its considerable wings, which span instead all manner of preoccupations from jazz to post-punk, from performance art to stream of consciousness poetry to the extent that ultimately you discard all musical landmarks and just appreciate this remarkable collection for what it is.

It's something not bound by style descriptions or by musical conventions.  At times - as on 'That's How It Goes' - the narrative quickly escapes any musical constraints and the result has a disjointed fascination that few of Kloba's listed musical heroes could ever hope to obtain.  There are times when the jagged instrumentation attains something akin to a definable and sustained riff - as on 'Diane Has Words' - but once again the restless zeal for experimentation in this artist's work never allows anything predictable or conventional to settle on it before the music escapes once again, bidding the listener to follow only as a sonic explorer.  'It Was Me' has the temerity to spin off still further, into a courageous and deeply endearing realm of humour.   Kloba plays with sound, and sometimes it even plays back.

It's music for those who want to explore, but in Kloba you won't find a tour guide or an artist who bids you follow like some avant pied piper; rather, her signposts are fleeting and elusive in an album that demands as much from the listener as it gives.  I'm playing the track 'Fast Forward' in my Dandelion Radio show this month.  I reckon it's as good an introduction to her music as you'll find anywhere on this collection, but the important thing is not to stop there because the album demands to be heard as a whole, and repeatedly.  Kloba's made it easy for you to do this - the twelve tracks are available on her bandcamp site to download for only $1 or as a CD for $4.   For that, you're getting the kind of listening experience that can never be limited to a single sitting, which strikes me as one hell of a bargain, and then some.