Kuedo - Severant

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release
Soundclips

5...according to our Brian on Fri 14 Oct, 2011.

'Severant' is a marvel of a debut LP from this former half of tuff dark grime duo Vex'd. Gone are the ominous atmospheres and pummelling stalker beats/breaks of yore and also much of the wayward technicolour muntering wonky he was producing recently only to usher in snappy ghetto beats, elegiac keys, kosmische moodscapes and heartbreak Balearic/"chillwave" vibes. It's a properly fresh stew he's a-cooking here, Mr. Teasdale, and I suspected from first listen this was going to feature in my albums of the year. Now that's an absolute! It's difficult to actually isolate any tracks for individual merit as 'Severant' truly works as an all-too-brief odyssey infused with both a free-spirited optimism and a regretful quality that is incredibly profound. The synths throughout tug at your emotions longingly whilst the crisp, frisky sounding beats fizz, hyper-click, rush and swagger for the duration. It's chock-full of sensual poppy rhythms and sad melodies and I feel a deep affinity with just about every tune. Identity is the key here, the template of sound isn't varied that much, keeping a blissfully coherent feel to proceedings but the tunes and ideas are in real abundance here. Those who heard, nay felt Vex'd knew of their deep commitment to punchy atmosphere-drenched production and although this is an entirely lighter and more reflective journey, it's nonetheless an all-enveloping one which you will be re-visiting for years, One of those albums you rather miss when it's finished! That beautiful.

To play these clips you need to either update your browser (Norman Records recommends Google Chrome) or update your Flash plugin.

On his debut long-player ‘Severant’, Jamie Teasdale aka Kuedo has made an album of dreamlike music, loaded with his own preoccupations with futurism and escapism, and one that's very different from his musical past as one half of Vex’d. With his intentions re-evaluated for the making of this album, his process to capture them has evolved to a more automatic way of creating tracks, cutting back on the endless technical options available to the modern producer and rendering them at a quicker pace to reveal a lighter, more truthful music, as he puts it: ”On the side of modernism”. In terms of feeling, ‘Severant’ explores the space between the detached world of the imagination and the real-time world; that feeling of coming out of a daydream, on the edge of the drift from the day-to-day grind. Jamie says of this moment ”As reality shapes imagination and escapism affects your choices in the real world, there is a strange relational loop between the two and the space in between the two. There’s a bitter sweetness in that gap, it has a certain emotive quality, kind of in between being and non-being”. Again, musically ‘Severant’ is inspired by related themes. It sounds as if it’s in a sweet spot between the emotive, innately futurist synth soundtracks of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, borne from a time when the very idea of futurism was more prevalent, in combination with musical ideas and inspiration from the emotionally ambivalent, materialist fantasies of ‘coke rap‘ such as The Clipse. Rhythmically the record is influenced by what Jamie calls “the two ultra modern musics of modern times”, footwork from Chicago, which Planet Mu has explored in depth on its recent releases, and again the drum machine grids of coke rap. Jamie says ”I wanted to capture a really futurist sentiment, kind of melancholy and grand luminescent, so I used the instrument that most evokes that for me - that sweeping Vangelis brass sound.” And on coke rap he talks about the emotional “half being” of the music, the energetically charged, detached ambivalence of the MCs, and the admission that the MCs could be “fantasising without admitting to doing so.” The title ‘Severant’ refers to stark changes of circumstances in Jamie’s life when the album was made and the music works strangely like scenes from a film: tracks are concise and direct and one of the albums great and unusual strengths is that on repeated listens different songs rise to the surface and the album repeatedly changes and develops in the listeners ears and mind.

TRACKLIST:

01. Visioning Shared Tomorrows 02. Ant City 03. Whisper Fate 04. Onset (Escapism) 05. Scissors 06. Truth Flood 07. Reality Drift 08. Ascension Phase 09. Salt Lake Cuts 10. Seeing The Edges 11. Flight Path 12. Shutter Light Girl 13. Vectoral 14. As We Lie Promising 15. Memory Rain

Be the first to review this record. Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!