London based artist Jesse Kanda is probably best known for his ties to the Deconstructed-club scene at the time of its emergence, where he was largely responsible for shaping the visual aesthetic of the micro-genre’s most prominent artists. Responsible for the grotesque, mutant creatures of Arca and FKA Twigs, and the amorphous alien lifeforms of Björk’s Utopia, Kanda’s visual language has been integral in shaping the aesthetic direction of contemporary electronic music. As Doon Kanda, the artist switches mediums with his muses, applying his left-field approach to music. 2017’s heart would introduce us to Doon Kanda’s world, one which appeared similar to those of his peers, but felt distinct in its naïvety. It’s a naïvety that for the most part, worked in Kanda’s favour, with heart coming off as charmingly and creatively earnest. On Galatea, his latest album, Kanda keeps moving with the times of the scene he helped build. But while he displays significant growth in his skills as a producer, Galatea is ultimately weakened by inconsistency.
Galatea finds itself occupied with glitchy, industrial IDM, future garage, and deconstructed beats. This is most evident on tracks like Ophelia, with its menacing breakbeat pieced together from chopped up bits of static. Kitten plays out like a deranged cover of present Bonobo, its gait so unstable that it’s a marvel the thing stays together at all. It’s this instability that accounts for the thrill of the track though, akin to the off-kilter trip-hop of Sega Bodega, making it one of the album’s early standouts. On the icy Bewitched, Kanda updates witch house for the streaming era, while on the delightfully unhinged Divinity, he experiments with syncopation and a loose reggaeton structure. But for all these moments of promise, Galatea is also full of ideas that come off like proposals or sketches of something bigger, though they never quite get to where they suggest they’re going. Cupid’s Kiss, a somewhat darkwave leaning pop song, sounds like it was created with lyrics in mind, and in the absence of any vocals, feels half-baked. Aster Crucis suffers a similar flaw, and sounds too nonspecific on the same track list as the acerbic rave pastiche of Ottoline. End, Galatea’s finale, uses a trick that’s become popular among industrial bass and post-club’s artists; distorting and dampening the audio so it appears as if we are listening to the song from a distance. Kanda does little to adapt this trope though, and End comes off sounding a touch too familiar.
Download and stream Galatea here
Kanda’s scope as a producer has undoubtedly expanded in the five years since heart, and Galatea shows ample proof of this. The album is in need of editing; with the fat trimmed, what remains is a heap of promise. Galatea’s most interesting moments happen to be its shortest. The quasi-interludes Pearlescent and Chariot reveal Kanda’s point of view most distinctly. Like his work in visual art, these are visceral, uncanny Frankenstein monsters sewn together from fragments of reality. Their abjection echoes the disquiet of Kanda’s sculptural monsters, his mutant half-creatures that speak toward the experience of otherness and alienation. It’s in these moments, brief as they may be, that Doon Kanda manages to say the most.
Listen to Chariot from Galatea below.
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