- Impactful club music from the Janus artist.
- Kajsa Blom, the artist known as KABLAM, was recently accepted on a course in electroacoustic composition at the Royal College Of Music in Stockholm. It's an intriguing development for someone with such a rule-breaking approach to sound. Ever since "SPIRITO SARRANDO" appeared on SoundCloud in 2015—an audacious mix of Renaissance music, neck-snapping beats and baile funk vocals—the Swedish producer's music has often toyed with discordant ideas. This continues to be the case on the horror-inflected sound world of Confusía, Blom's debut album.
Writhing rhythms dominate almost all of Confusía's 13 tracks, a reflection perhaps of Blom's apparent focus on DJing (this is only her second full release). On "Horses," you'll find clipped vocals, staccato kicks and other pleasingly brittle sounds. The playful beat of "Forced" is underpinned by clock samples and jittery pitched-up chanting. "Everything For Everyone" layers operatic singing, twinkling harpsichord and police sirens alongside hammering double-time kick drums and triplet hi-hats. Confusía is awash with inventive tonal juxtapositions and violent rhythmic contortions, at times recalling the choppy patterns of emerging UK producers such as LOFT and BFTT.
In a 2016 interview with The Fader, Blom suggested the confrontational music she'd made as a teenager was in response to Sweden's political climate. It's tempting to trace a punk-ish line from those screaming, guitar-playing early years through to her recent output. Where Furiosa, her 2016 EP on Janus, often felt angry, Confusía appears less emotionally direct. The album is often disorienting, each new percussive configuration more destabilising than the last.
What Confusía lacks is the connective tissue that held Furiosa together. The resulting tracks can seem disparate and skeletal, swinging from the trancey, hardstyle influences of "The Carver" to the more abstract drums of "Miasma" without maintaining the momentum. "Remembrance" is one instance where a lack of momentum is welcome. The track opens with deep, bowed cello, after which she adds cavernous kicks, fluttering percussion and a reverbed guitar line reminiscent of The Durutti Column. It ends on blissful, synthetic-sounding strings, a reminder that even amid the chaos Blom is able to conjure fleeting beauty.
Tracklist01. Plague
02. Innominata
03. Horses
04. Problems
05. DJ HAY!?
06. Crux
07. Remembrance
08. Vanmakt
09. Forced
10. For Hildegard
11. Everything For Everyone
12. The Carver
13. Miasma