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Klara Lewis
I am sure that working under the shadow of a massively influential father (Graham, in this case) is not an enviable position, but Klara's brief and enticing debut is unusual and eerie enough to avoid any annoying comparisons or unmet expectations.  Culled from field recordings made in Europe, Russia, and Turkey, Lewis' pieces sculpt a host of unmusical sounds into spectral and unsettling minimalist dance music that is deliciously alienating and undanceable.
Amusingly, "sound collages made from exotic travels" might be my single least favorite micro-genre amidst the cassette and CDR underground, as they are often pretty inept and also make me angry that other people have more interesting lives than me.  Consequently, Lewis' success and ingenuity with similar material is both refreshing and unexpected.  Of course, these are not collages so much as a forlorn 10-minute long musique concrète dance party and even within that very bizarre aesthetic realm, Klara is anything but straightforward.  For example, while she manages to create an infectiously scratchy rhythm in "c a t t," it is an ephemeral one and periodically gets displaced by ghostly swells and echoey clangs.  Also, a tea kettle makes a prominent appearance, adding a pleasant dash of absurdity to Lewis' haunted and hollow pulsings.
Klara only allows conventional musicality to infiltrate her work on the closing piece, "49th hour," which incorporates an undead-sounding Russian opera singer and something resembling a simple bass line near the end.  It fits seamlessly though, probably making it the EP's most accessible "song" without sacrificing any of the darkness and dislocation of the previous pieces.  Obviously, music this unapologetically bleak and fragmented is not for everybody, but it is complex, unpredictable, and uncompromising enough to be quite striking to jaded ears like mine.  In a distant way, in fact, this EP shares quite a bit of common ground with bleaker UK dance luminaries like Raime and Demdike Stare, but takes things to a much more abstract and difficult extreme.  That said, it seems like Klara will have her work cut out for her if she ever attempts to sustain such a pure anti-music aesthetic for longer than ten minutes.  For now, however, this is a very promising and distinctive debut.
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