K. Leimer - In the Palace of Lights

Seattle. The second half of the 1970s

Mid-1970s. The far northwest of the United States: Seattle. This is where Kerry Leimer began recording his music. "I started out with friends," K. Leimer tells us in an email exchange, "one of the first things we ever recorded on tape was our own version of a Faust track, 'The Sad Skinhead'. With the arrival of the micromoog and Teac multitrack recorders in the late Seventies, it became possible to make all kinds of recordings at home. In town there was a group of musicians emerging from the ever-active State College scene. Bruce Pavitt would go on to found Sub Pop. Steve Peters still runs his label today. John Foster founded Op magazine. I knew all these people, but since my work wasn't centered on performance, the usual social dimension never played much of a role in what I did." Then, in 1979, Kerry founded Palace Of Lights, releasing the single "Fiction/Decade", followed the next year by his first LP, Closed System Potentials. The record opens with the lunar eclipse of "Aerial", a kind of mission statement for K. Leimer's music: the fairy-like song of a barely-there drone, electronics flowing like velvet across time. There's more body in the progressions of "Derivative" and "The Random in Nature", concentric melodies recalling the ritual geometric figures of divine mandalas. The door to the new space-time is now open, and "Red Line" comes across as enveloping and sinuous, the electronics of Tangerine Dream seen through a more mathematical, experimental sensibility. "I never listened to many American bands much," Leimer continues. "Mostly it was Faust, Neu!, Cluster, and the projects of Eno & Fripp. The American scene seems more interested in money than in art. Even the independent scene craved legitimacy from the industry. Popularity was never an issue for me, once I understood that my purpose was to pursue a personal interest - namely, to learn about music and about ways of recording it."

This spirit explains K. Leimer's second album, Land Of Look Behind, created as the score for a film about the death of Bob Marley. "I used a lot of concrete recordings to reconstruct the environment, the sounds and the voices of the people in the film. As an album, it's the one I like least among my own, for several reasons. Partly because it was written and recorded too quickly, in just two months."

The record indeed lacks the intensity of the previous work. "Two Voices" has a sparse, disorienting rhythm. Only "The Cockpit" carries on in the vein of that ambient music built on decaying loops (the unwanted effects of the DBX) that would soon make the fortune of so many other American musicians.

The same year as Land Of Look Behind also saw the release of the Savant collaboration between K. Leimer and label-mates David Keller, James Keller, Marc Barreca and Robert Carlberg. "That collaboration was my attempt to work with other musicians in a genuine way, using the studio as an instrument and with discipline. The music on this record, and on other recordings, isn't 'written', rehearsed, and then played and taped. On the contrary, it's assembled in such a variety of ways that it couldn't exist outside a recording studio. In the Savant project, the musicians took on the role that pre-recorded tapes, signal processing and editing played in my other recordings. Of course, all the musicians involved in this project came from a rock background, so the result inevitably bears that stamp."

Robert Fripp is the most frequently cited musician within the folds of the record: both for the guitar interplay of the then-current reincarnation of King Crimson (the first one with Adrian Belew), and for his early work in frippertronics alongside Brian Eno.

With Imposed Order, K. Leimer returns to the heights of his debut. Frenetic, anxious sounds, brutally driven by lightning-fast percussion, open the record, almost a summa of his previous work. Calm slowly takes over through K. Leimer's skilled hands, running gently across synthesizers, spectrum analyzers and reel-to-reel recorders, modulating lush acoustic waves that echo through the lengthy "Three Forms Of Decay" and "Life Of The Poet". "Water Music" returns murky and lively, with layers overlapping and building into a majestic density of sound.

The album closes by crowning the listening experience amid valleys of peace and hints of silence, right up to the closing "Method, Language And Silence". The final musical testament of this Leimerian quartet, the track is the perfect conclusion to "Imposed Order", where the pauses, the intensity, the rhythmic shifts and the ambient sighs find a perfect harmony in a deeply relaxing, dreamlike psychic and auditory balance.

World Wide Web. Twenty years later

In 1999, Kerry Leimer returned to music through a website where fans could buy leftover copies of his old LPs and the first CD-R reissues. Leimer himself explains the reasons behind such a long hiatus from music: "The computer design office I'd founded with a few friends was growing and becoming quite well known, with clients in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Toronto, Vancouver and Seattle. The time needed to run that business, together with the demands of our clients - Microsoft, Nintendo, Zurich and many others - left me without the attention needed to write new music. Still, music proved impossible to shake off completely, and starting in 1998 I began setting up a studio again."

After almost twenty years of silence, K. Leimer returns with new music, well into the digital age. The method, however, remains the same: "Given monophonic synthesizers, multitracking is the only way to arrive at a triad. Digital synthesizers are a different story, and the temptation to simply use some combination of presets is strong. And indeed, listening to any number of today's electronic or progressive groups, you can't help but notice that synthesizers are used just like any ordinary keyboard with an oscillator, with very little attention paid to the implications of synthesis and to what it offers or makes possible. So sound density is certainly easier to achieve now; but the more important question is how you use it." The new record is called The Listening Room, and the review of the album comes from the artist himself: "'The Listening Room' is another ambient music album, but there are some important differences between this and ambient albums in the strict sense, which I hope push the genre a bit further. First, the pieces easily evolve into recognizable movements rather than following the more static ambient tradition. Second, the music tries to present multiple elements simultaneously, rather than the typical ambient 'sonic mass'. There are passages where the instruments are played rather than manipulated. The goal is to create a denser sonic experience, an approach to ambient that invites active listening while still allowing for a more passive kind of hearing. I've called all this 'an intricate calm', hoping to underline the added complexity contained in this music. I spent almost a year getting familiar with digital instruments and the studio, developing new techniques and trying new approaches, from the use of modified phasing to sound manipulation, even to written musical parts, which hint at my interest in classical and medieval music. I also used digital instruments (Kurzweil and Yamaha synthesizers) alongside analog ones (mellotron). However, I didn't use any digital technique to edit the album."

The same year that The Listening Room came out, the collaboration with Tyler Boley, Brittle Soft, was recorded. It's a three-track EP running almost half an hour. Boley is a photographer, but for the occasion he picks up an electric guitar, showing off all its shimmering noise on the EP's opening track, Brittle Soft. Then, slowly, Leimer's mellotron and synthesizers blanket the guitar, which in the meantime grows cleaner and cleaner, in soothing ambient arpeggios. The rest of the EP was released in 2006. "Statistical Truth" is a record that shows the two faces of K. Leimer's music: on one side, stretches of ecstatic ambient ("Divided Light", the new version of "Four Pages From An Unfinished Novel"); on the other, experiments that seem to spring from cold synthesis algorithms ("Dark Form", "Distribution And Status Of Small Green Birds").

Leimer seems to have found his footing again on the following The Useless Lesson, helped in part by a list of collaborators: guitarist Leo Abrahams on the velvety "Long After Download"; the enigmatic Swedish sound manipulator Anode on the long, static "Failing Need Of More"; and American musician Dwight Ashley on the more rhythmic "Anosognosia". For the occasion, Leimer writes one of his finest mellotron pieces, which shines with all its charge of melancholy on the dazzling "To Force Closed Our Eyes". Completely at ease in an era when even indie-rock music seems to have discovered the healing power of drone, Leimer lets his synthesizers sink into unfathomable depths, paying tribute to Tangerine Dream masterpieces like Atem and Zeit on the sprawling "Declining Need Of More". His love for progressive rock and classical music also seems to find an ideal form in the formal elegance of "Music That Conceives of Itself As Music".

In 2008 came Lesser Epitomes, a seventy-minute record split into three suites, each in turn divided into several parts. In the first, the longest of the three, Leimer gives full rein to his grandiloquence, with synthesizers emulating string instruments building to crescendos reminiscent of Klaus Schulze's narrative epics. The last of the suites, on the other hand, reveals the ambient, meditative side of Leimer's music, with the synthesizers forever probing the synapses where memories hide. As Leimer himself writes on his website: "The music on 'Lesser Epitomes' comes from the aleatoric reordering of discrete, compatible components that emulate typical theme-and-variation relationships. The final results were either reworked into deliberately altered versions or left as they were. The three main pieces are indexed to allow random reordering during playback - and reordering is encouraged."

Finally, Leimer meets one of his many disciples, Taylor Deupree. Degraded Certainties is among the most immersive works Leimer has ever released. The album's tracks are built using aleatoric techniques, processing a series of files and layering the results with a dense electronic haze. Deupree takes charge during mixing and post-production, giving the final result a soft, muffled quality. The album's six tracks form a kind of seamless, unbroken drone, enveloping the elegiac atmosphere of "Allotropy" as well as the darker mood of "Hommage".

Leimer's ambient music has been updated to the grammar of the digital age.

K. Leimer is finally getting recognition among new generations: even Greg Davis has taken note, deciding to press, on his private label Autumn Records, an old 1983 Leimer cassette, Music For Land And Water. It's a concert recorded at Seward Park in Seattle, where listeners had to move around to appreciate the effects of the five different loops on stage. To the three tracks recorded live, the CD edition adds another of equal beauty. This is near-static music, slowly evolving through the layering of out-of-phase loops. "[I was] clearly using derivative techniques," Leimer writes in the liner notes, "pioneered on records like Eno's 'Music For Airports' and later refined on more recent works such as Robert Henke's 'Indigo Transform'".

Music For Land And Water is the missing link between the Eno-Budd collaborations and the loop experiments of William Basinski.

With a discography spanning over forty years, Kerry Leimer returns to his own label Palace Of Lights with Weighted Room (2026), a work that seems to build itself. The idea is to start from no fixed premise: rather than beginning with a concept, the Canadian artist lets the music determine its own form through continuous translations from audio to MIDI and back, reorganizing the sonic material into multiple reworkings.

What emerges is a unified sound, as if strings, piano, horns and drums converged into a single fabric, crossed by internal variations that never break away from the original ensemble: a kind of Giacinto Scelsi filtered through the hushed canons of ambient. The result recalls chamber music, dark-jazz and post-minimalism, without any single component ever taking over the others.

The mastering, entrusted to Taylor Deupree, lends the album an enveloping, soft quality. We're far from the tribal ambient of "Imposed Order" or the near lo-fi tape music of "Music For Land And Water" (both from 1983); here a contemplative stillness prevails, a reflective journey made of gentle granulations that allow distance from ordinary noise, giving shape to a room weighed down, to borrow the title, by mostly whispered sonic effluvia, at times lyrical, as in the cello of the title track.

Timbral missteps are rare: the work is coherent, but it raises questions about ambient music's fragile balance between a drive toward subtraction and the risk of excessive timidity. Though layered, the listening experience sometimes leans toward passivity; "Weighted Room" is enveloping, but struggles to assert itself as truly magnetic, leaving the impression of an extremely elegant exercise in style.

Contributions by Alessandro Giustiniano ("Degraded Certainties")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google