KJ – Wake

Beautiful, foamy tones rise up and out of wake. Its tone is slightly suppressed, but that doesn’t stop the music from spreading its wings, and thankfully it doesn’t add any extra baggage to the music. It’s weightless music, floating like a balloon and obscured by the atmosphere’s thick clouds.

The reversing melody of ‘blue’ soars along the horizon, its light, looping construction as delicate as a wing of a bird. Surrounded by a soft reverb, the sky is painted with a risen, deep blue melody. It slowly approaches the inevitable silence, and as it fades it fizzles out like a day old Coke. Sleep lines are still etched on the skin of the music, and as the sun settles on the cheek it presents that kind glow of a morning as it breaks.

New York producer kj sets wake in between a period of restful sleep and gradual awakening. One open eye is all it takes to immediately dissolve the dream and render it only a vague photograph. Everything is somewhat blurred as a result, but as time passes crystal tones begin to emerge out of a thicker, sleepy cocoon, the waking state gradually eclipsing the overcast, low-hanging textures.

Delta waves walk into the weak, glowing light of dawn, crossing over from the blank void of the subconscious, but don’t let this child of light trick you into thinking wake is a pale record.

Bright swells sail out of radiant harmonies, blending in with a series of notes that are nothing more than spectral illusions, flitting against the side of the music like eyelashes encased in an icy, deep slumber. It’s impressive in the way that it comes together – and on a debut, no less.

Ambient music that lives with purity in its heart, at one with a harmonious and blissfully naive state of being: that’s wake. The deep, almost brooding harmony of ‘Noville’ stretches and reflects, its loop backing up on itself before repeating, but there’s always a feeling of fluidity; the music’s as smooth as a pebble, and despite its looping, it never feels like a slog. It’s just the right length. The delayed romanticism of ‘beyond’ is an all-too-short, sugar-sweet dream, tinted with a pink sky.

Ultimately, wake feels like a vaguely remembered dream, the voice of a lover calling from the unfathomable distance of a past life, a voice you crave to hear, breezing into the half-open doorway of the present.

www.ownrecords.com

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