KALIPO - Yaruto

Until a few years ago, Jakob Häglsperger played bass for Frittenbude, a German band somewhere between punk and electroclash. His love for electronic gadgetry was already well known back then, even if the band's context always kept him from developing it within a genuinely exploratory path of his own. It's precisely out of that need that Kalipo was born, a project that has largely flown under the radar and which we ourselves are arriving at rather late — and it's a safe bet that the Bavarian's long experience behind the mixing desk has had a hand in it. But the fact is it's well worth the wait, because this delightful “Yaruto” is perhaps one of the most emblematic records of the state of that exquisitely contemporary electronic art, straddling post-dubstep hipster mania (from James Blake to How To Dress Well), neo-garage alienation on parallel planets (Burial), and a new classicism tinged with pop in a shared tandem of IDM and minimal techno (Hopkins and, sorry to anyone who still thinks he's passé, Trentemøller).

The cover art captures Häglsperger's attitude perfectly: that of a curious child with no boundaries, ready to get excited and let his imagination run wild without restraint. Here, our man does nothing but shut himself in his room, listen to a ton of this stuff, pour into it a passion that bloomed who knows how (for gamelan music), and put together a small treatise on the fusion of 2014-vintage electronics and pop. The opening of “Embryo,” quietly lifted from a few blocks further north, is in this sense a mischievous yet exquisite incipit — echoed later on “Wilt” alone — that gives little hint of the mortar blasts to come. This collection of gems is more varied than ever, leaving the door wide open to just about everyone: “Come” is pure future-garage whose human warmth grows by the second, essentially taking the reverse route and edging toward the atmosphere more clearly framed among the jolts of “Take Care Of Your Paradise.”

The title track draws openly, without hiding it, from “Into The Great Wide Yonder,” and from there moves, in a curiously exotic direction, into the Quasi Folk Development of “Listen To You”: you can feel Munich in it, in short, even without quite realizing it. The mental detours of “Ganja” flirt with dub and slip in those watery deep-techno sounds that artists like Deepchord and Deadbeat (though, in an ambient key, Voices From The Lake deserve their share of credit too) have taught lesson after lesson on, sounds we now find everywhere without even noticing. The whole record, in fact, works as a kind of litmus test, a crucial experiment to show what a rock musician today, flirting skillfully with electronics, would instinctively come up with.

The apotheosis, though, lies in the middle, in the ten damnably Holden-esque minutes of "Get Rich": a riot of arpeggiators climbing and swiftly plunging, flash-powder whirlpools dancing over sturdy piano chords, rhythms clashing against each other like a game of laser tag.

The come-down of it all lies in the finale, in the nod — without subservience — to early Autechre on "Cloud Dancing II", in the contrast between organic shadings and energy turned into rhythmic mottling veiled in noise after the short-circuit. Like pretending to be a master in your first year of school.

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17/11/2014