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Cankun, "Idle"
Cankun's music is an exercise in stretching pop hooks to their logical extreme. They push back against standard compositional forms by forcing a rigid, dutiful recurrence on their melodies, layering them with more and more complex loops in the style of electronic music until they reach a kind of psychedelic apex.
Idle is a record of anticipatory bliss, full of shimmering guitars, echoing drum machines, and ambient harmonics pulsating throughout. Peaceful chords and whirring resonant drones pervade each song with increasingly beautiful effect, but they never actually seem to go anywhere. To some, this might seem like the work of a group trapped in the initial stages of writing a summer pop anthem. But Cankun's music touches on a different nerve than standard verse-chorus-verse payoff. Their songs are focused on capturing a single, perfect moment through guitars and drums, then recreating that moment ceaselessly until nothing else can be done with it. The music chooses to remain stationary, but it stills feels as if, by listening to it, you are going somewhere, moving in some direction. There are obvious similarities to krautrock or early psychedelia, mainly in the sense that Cankun wants to achieve more with less.
Cankun break up the eight minute "Sneakers" in half, with two similarly structured guitar loops and cascading waves of synthesizer coloring each part in gradually more intense ways. On "Where's Zion?," they introduce vocals in the song's second half, repeating a single indecipherable mantra over and over as it slowly becomes more yelling than singing. On "I Know You Love To Dance," they apply lo-fi distortion to a persistent strum of guitars and metallic percussion, which blurs into a haze of noise before fading away. The closing song, "Water Alps," features drums in the forefront, where they collide playfully over what sounds like a passing train.
Each piece is distinctly crafted as if to designate a certain space, or a place in time. In fact, taken as a single document, the six songs on Idle might appear to be a set of six photographs, exactly detailing the events of a day in the form of specific points plucked from its hours. A persistent theme of hazy, filtered pop and repetition is omnipresent, but the constant reinforcing of that theme—of recurring memories and the bliss of lingering in them—makes the album more cohesive than monotonous. Cankun has built small but pleasant glimpse into another world.
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