The Log and the Leeway has driven Bram Bosteels through a period of unprecedented personal change. The recording process encompassed so much more than music. First and foremost, it acted as a friend. Secondly, it acted as a therapeutic channel, an always-available outlet for healing, processing, and eventual release. A rare, spectral folk music has emerged from this metamorphosis, and it’s created a genuinely diverse record. Kaboom Karavan’s fourth outing has been in the making for the last six years or so, and the resulting music shudders with unexpected quakes of change, the newly-scarred fault-lines leaving a deep gouge in the music’s appearance. Bosteels had to navigate this new cartography, and he had to make the jump over new and cruel grooves.
Bram’s concept of The Log and the Leeway came from the word itself – ‘the gradual departure from an intended course due to external influences’. Life doesn’t adhere to a rulebook or forward planning, and the record shifted away from its original intent. A curiosity and a fascination for travel journals, logbooks, and jewel quests undertaken by explorers to far-flung and exotic regions of the world enters the music through its spritely sense of adventure and its mystical folk music, removing itself from the traditional and the accepted; every note offers up a new treasure. Earthy and yet entertaining possibilities of the extradimensional and the bending of accepted, universal laws, The Log and the Leeway’s music is surprising, reflecting the change that Bram experienced in the form of notes which appear out of nowhere, like potentially-lethal shocks of high voltage.
Sadly, Bram lost his father suddenly and unexpectedly from a rare disease, and the music that naturally poured out turned into another, unexpected colour, morphing from what it once was to a new state and flowing into a new direction. Like a leeway, his musical course had shifted due to external events, the intended direction of the album left in question. The event has left its scar (or maybe it resembles a birthmark?) upon the music, levelling it up with awakenings and enlightenments that weren’t possible before. Realisations of life’s fragility and transience come to the fore, as well as the power of music to heal and to make a concrete statement. This is at the heart of The Log and the Leeway, but Bram’s loss also gave him the fuel and ignition with which to finish the record. As such, it’s also a dedication. In addition to the music, the record comes with a cover painting by John Lurie and a 16-page booklet of musical illustrations, courtesy of Walter Dhoogh and Erik K Skodvin.