- You won't come across a more original take on Kerri Chandler's music.
- Despite its rudimentary beginnings, house music became an unlikely home for extended and seventh chords. Equally present in the work of Bartók, Coltrane or Hendrix, these more complex voicings gave house a harmonic sophistication that's typically been labelled "deep," thanks largely to the stereotypically jazzy cool of the hugely popular major seventh chord. Few house producers were more at home in this unwieldy world of sharp ninths and minor elevenths than Kerri Chandler. While any old musician can dabble with major sevenths, Chandler had the harmonic fluency required to connect the dots between a wide range of voicings, giving his house a level of harmonic depth rarely touched otherwise.
As you could guess by his die Reihe alias—a reference to the twelve-tone row, or Herbert Eimert and Karlheiz Stockhausen's journal of the same name—Jack Callahan makes capital-E Experimental music. But he does it with a refreshing sense of humour: his superb Bánh Mì Verlag label sees Wandelweiser lords like Michael Pisaro rubbing shoulders with hilariously obliterated versions of Smash Mouth's "All Star." On 106 Kerri Chandler Chords, in which he reproduces chords transcribed from Kerri Chandler productions, he lands somewhere in the middle. While the premise is mildly absurd, the microscopic focus and reflective analysis is pure experimental music. The execution just so happens to be very beautiful.
Although Callahan performed the piece with a vocoder, the version released here by Primitive Languages pairs the S.E.M. Ensemble's strings with a barely perceptible subsonic thud, a nicely subtle way to further connect the music to Chandler's house. Silences separate each chord, creating a feel that we're observing specimens on a slow-moving conveyor belt. The presentation is deliberately sterile and devoid of affect. This only heightens the character of each chord, which all seem to exist in a vacant space where no author—Chandler, Callahan or otherwise—influences the music. Despite the hefty dose of context, it's essentially an aesthetic experience. Float in the weightless drift of a minor ninth; marvel at the jagged contours of a seventh sharp ninth; ponder the poise of the seventh suspended fourth. Or leave the liner notes aside and luxuriate in the myriad emotional contours Chandler's chords provide. The record succeeds just fine either way.
Almost accidentally, 106 Kerri Chandler Chords presents us with an opportunity to reflect on the crossover between experimental and dance music. As time goes on, more electronic dance music is described, unsatisfyingly, as "experimental." But little music in that admittedly vague category achieves such a perfect synthesis of genuinely experimental techniques to reveal something new and beautiful about the raw materials of dance music history. On a more utilitarian—and potentially depressing—level, 106 Kerri Chandler Chords must sit directly in the crosshairs of the algorithms curating the Spotify ambient playlist, such is its faceless pleasantness. Callahan, then, has made quite the Trojan horse: 106 Kerri Chandler Chords satisfies the study and chill crowds, chin-stroking boffins and dance music fans alike.
Tracklist01. 106 Kerri Chandler Chords (Outside The Club Mix)