ckeener

by Spenser Tomson

‘Intro’ is not an evaporation, but more like an elemental decay. It leaves a residue, the tell-tale matter all around to say that it had once been here. But before any responses can be registered and acted upon, it’s ‘Crime Drama pt1&2’. This is the tone.

Like the carpet of an adult film theatre, everything appears untarnished until examined with a UV light. Under scrutiny, the surfaces are abrasive and false like the seagulls that loop mechanical above.

ckeener is Carl Brown and on Decoration, you should imagine him as the detective peeling back layers of truth in his sonic crime drama or revealing invisible malevolence as though he brought a Geiger counter to a children’s party (see album closer, ‘Sellafield Kids’).

The feel is often corporeal and fleshy due, in part, to the abundance of human sounds and ephemeral human noise. They permeate the skin as completely as a pulse. But the core of these tracks are ghostly and haunted, like some kind of conflux between the material and the vaporous, like a poltergeist hurling a breeze block at a sideboard. Brown uses echo and glitch as a one-second-old aural ghost, a bassy doppelgänger that forces the listener to double-take.

And there’s ‘Heads Chat Shit’. Broken frequencies gather at pace before dispersing over fumbling synth tones and circling, angular noiselets. It’s low-pressure headaches, the rolling doom of digital chatter, the day-old dread of unbranded ethanol still diffusing and clouding the synapses.

It’s fucking weird/brilliant.

Decoration by Ckeener is available now from There There Records.