Year: 2010
Label: Drifting Falling
Catalog Number: DRIFITING020
Format: CD (digipak)
Despite their Teutonic name, Kontakte are actually a London band who create spacious instrumental post-rock soundscapes. Like their debut album Soundtracks to Lost Road Movies, We Move Through Negative Spaces showcases their impressive ability to layer warm, human elements such as acoustic guitars, violins and piano over a bed of glitchy beats, static, and icy electronica.
The stately opening track “Astralagus” is a prime example, with electric guitar arpeggios ringing prettily over a skittering drum pattern as a wall of distortion and feedback builds ominously, threatening to drown everything in warm noise. Other standout tracks are the gently insistent “With Glowing Hearts” and the album’s majestic ten-minute closer, “The Ocean Between You and Me,” which, like many of the tracks on the album, unfolds leisurely; building, fading, then building again to a cinematic peak.
Kontakte’s sound has drawn comparisons to Mogwai, Sigur Rós, Spiritualized, and Explosions in the Sky. I’m also reminded at times of U2, particularly The Edge’s guitar sound as shaped by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Comparisons aside, however, Kontakte’s mix of electronic and organic elements is unique enough to stand on its own merits, and We Move Through Negative Spaces offers more than a few inspired moments of wintry sonic bliss.
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