Kangding Ray’s first full-length document was by turns crystalline and granular. Rhythms were stretched, squeezed, and blown apart in space, valued artistically as well as scientifically, with echo, reverb, and delay creating vast canyons of muffled sound within fragile, pointillist networks of melody. Automne Fold features a good deal more sonic shape-shifting and bit-blasting, as Ray tests the compatibility of fractured, digitally processed and suggestive fragments with more fully formed, organic pieces of music with grace and easy assurance.
It’s simply but ably mixed, with sparse, hair-trigger beats that dovetail cleanly. A particularly strong concentration on form is evident on this occasion, as rhythmic signatures of techno, electro, and dub are heard somewhere behind the scrim of bytes, like grave-rubbings rendered pixel by pixel. In fact, a conventional musicality often works in tandem with the unconventional texture of the music. A track like “Idle” features firing arpeggios and pitchbending squawks put to the service of the composition, but at the same time its pushed to a brittle edge, and never sounds so straight as to be mere mimicry of a model. Further pieces are predominated by rhythms that sound as though they were sourced from a failing dot-matrix printer, supplemented by gentle filigree embellishments and counterweighted by warbling tones that deceive as to precisely what Kangding is smuggling through underneath.
Two vocal tracks grace the album, accompanied by a spoken word selection written and spoken by author Andrew Cannon. Pleasure in the sound and shape of words and their rhythmic combination oozes generously from these pieces. While a creeping lyricism is characteristic of all of the works on display here, it is, perhaps naturally enough, most apparent on these tracks. Even so, it generally doesn’t undermine their careful constructions; and the shift in emphasis does not betray the album as consisting of multiple fragments assembled under a certain law. The picture offered by Automne Fold remains a total one – an atmosphere saturated with memories, ambience, and temporal depth.
Max Schaefer
