(2020) Kaki King - Modern Yesterdays


Review:
Kaki King‘s Modern Yesterdays is the guitar magician’s first studio outing in five years, and her debut for Cantaloupe Music. Her last outing was the digital score to her touring multimedia work The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, featuring her signature “projection mapping” technology — wherein video images are projected onto the body of a large, white guitar she plays simultaneously. Modern Yesterdays was recorded in Brooklyn with sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson and Arjan Miranda as co-producers. The album title deliberately reflects the global COVID-19 pandemic’s before and after, made more poignant as King and her co-producers contracted the virus despite being quarantined. Modern Yesterdays offers abundant articulations of post-classical, jazz, folk, and blues motifs, and electro-acoustic influences. All of King’s musical hallmarks are present but are sometimes delivered in surprising ways. Her dazzling, poly-harmonic and -rhythmic approach is highlighted on the fleet, driving opener “Default,” where open-tuned folk and blues meet Thompson’s expansive sound design. Her sonic architecture is not just sound effects. She specifically creates environment for, that remain inseparable from, the musical canvasses King creates, using drones, delays, ambient backdrops, as well as field-recorded and sampled sounds from the natural world. There are also showcases for the Passerelle Bridge here. Co-developed by King and luthier Rachel Rosenkrantz, the Passerelle is inserted under the strings of the guitar’s 16th fret. It turns any six-string instrument into a 12-note one that sounds like a zither, Japanese koto, or Chinese guzheng. It can be used for effects, or as a different instrument. The gorgeous first single “Teek” employs the implement as a compositional tool. While King’s right hand fingerpicks under the bridge, the left hammers on and bends strings above it, creating multiphonics. King delivers two harmonic melodies simultaneously as guest violist Ralph Farris (Ethel) accompanies. Combined with sound design, one can hear four separate melodies, rendered tenderly and dreamily. On “Rhythmic Tiny Sand Ball Patterns,” she combines the Passerelle with a nearly formless musicality as Thompson’s sound design frames her guitar playing in bright, washed-out drones while treating King’s percussive use of the guitar’s body as a cavernous well of insistent, foreboding echo around a skeletal yet deeply moving whole tone melody. “Puzzle Me,” and “Lorlir” are classic King jams with sonic twists. Her deft, muscular fingerpicking rings across the middle- and lower-register strings amid a labyrinth of refracted sounds — bubbles, wordless synthed vocal choruses, percussive reverb, etc. — as she moves through intricate, driving, polytonal melodies articulated in several musical languages simultaneously. Closer “Forms of Light and Death” was arranged by Icelandic composer and synthesist Úlfur Hansson, and is the only track here to feature King on electric slide guitar. It touches on Eastern modes and blues forms with slippery electronics that unobtrusively underscore and highlight each weighty line. Even by King’s standards, Modern Yesterdays is remarkable: It extends the guitar’s role in contemporary music to one of nearly limitless possibility without leaving the realm of deeply pleasurable listening.





Tracklist:
01 - Default Shell
02 - Can’t Touch This or That or You or My Face
03 - Teek
04 - Goodchild
05 - Rhythmic Tiny Sand Ball Patterns
06 - Puzzle Me-You
07 - Final State
08 - Lorlir
09 - Sanitized, Alone
10 - Sei Sei
11 - Forms of Light and Death


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, classical
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits