- Gunnar Haslam used to study particle physics. These days, he makes music that might present a mathematics paper as sound. Though his 12-inches have been mostly club material, his albums have wandered off the grid. His last three full-lengths, all for L.I.E.S., gravitated towards strange and beatless music. There were bizarre melodies, shuddering drones and transmissions lost in the void. Even if Haslam is best known for making techno, he's often leaned towards abstraction.
On Kalaatsakia, the producer's latest full-length (and his first for The Bunker New York), he does this better than ever. The album reaches for greater extremes, its tempo, style and textures subject to sudden shifts. There are fewer dance and ambient tracks, more soundscapes in which one style bleeds into the other. Tempos range from zero to 144 BPM, with each beat held together by traces of calypso, dancehall and dub—a fresh set of qualities in Haslam's work.
Kalaatsakia can be warm and easygoing. "Transdisciplinary" gets its rhythm from fat bass plucks and tiny wooden hits. "Kaltrees" braids an acid line into its plump and blissful melody. "Second Version" hangs in the air like a puff of smoke, with snubbed kicks that pace through barely-there voices. When the album becomes more challenging—which it does often—these melodic tracks offer moments of comfort.
The album's other tracks are stranger still. The fastest, "Broadcast" and "Kjolle," are trippy mixes of dub and electro. "Istvaeonic" is a cut of transient techno that gets more frantic as it goes. "Nxbound" and "Rservoir," two intriguing takes on ambient, are solemn shapeshifters that move from bare-bone beats into blankets of noise. "Kalapuyan" leans towards modular abstraction, with crystal-clear frequencies that crack like glass. For an album that covers so much territory, Kalaatsakia is admirably cohesive, pinning down Haslam's increasingly idiosyncratic sound.
Tracklist01. Broadcast
02. Kalapuyan
03 Transdisciplinary
04. Nxbound
05. Kjolle
06. Rservoir
07. Istvaeonic
08. Kpalaga
09. Kaltrees
10. Invariance
11. Density
12. Second Version