K. LEIMER - Weighted Room

With a discography spanning over forty years, Kerry Leimer returns to his own label, Palace Of Lights, with a work that seems to build itself as it goes. The idea is not to start from a fixed premise: rather than beginning with a concept, the American artist lets the music determine its own shape through continuous back-and-forth translations from audio to MIDI and vice versa, reorganizing the material into multiple reworkings. The result recalls, in equal measure, chamber music, dark jazz and post-minimalism.

The mastering, entrusted to Taylor Deupree, helps shape a warm, enveloping sound. We're far from the tribal ambient of "Imposed Order" or the almost lo-fi tape music of "Music For Land And Water" (both from 1983); here a contemplative stillness prevails, gentle granulations that allow one to step back from ordinary noise, giving form to a room weighed down by mostly whispered sonic effluvia, at times lyrical, as in the cello of the title track.

What emerges is a unified sound, as if strings, piano, winds and drums converged into a single fabric crossed by internal variations, never detached from the original ensemble: a kind of Giacinto Scelsi filtered through the hushed canons of ambient. Timbral missteps are rare and the work is coherent, but it raises questions about the fragile balance of ambient music, suspended between a vocation for subtraction and the risk of excessive timidity. "Weighted Room" is enveloping, but struggles to assert itself as truly magnetic: almost an hour of refined music that glides past without leaving deep marks.

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04/03/2026