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With Moon in Gemini, Isik Kural has quietly, and with a distinct emphasis on care, made one of the year’s most varied and rewarding albums.
Isik Kural’s music draws up interesting and unexpected boundaries. On one hand, it is comforting, at times almost soporific, but on another, it feeds off the exhilaration of the uncanny, airbrushing one genre or style over another or mixing two that normally wouldn’t want to be mixed. Part of this willingness to try out unlikely combinations might come from Kural’s peripatetic past – Turkish by birth, he studied music in Miami and Helsinki and is now based in Glasgow – and part of it almost certainly comes from his wide-ranging tastes, not only in music but also in literature and art.
It all begins fairly innocuously. Moon in Gemini’s first track, Body of Water, is a gentle, rippling instrumental with a simple acoustic guitar motif which rises and falls, backed by soft horns. It sets the tone for the rest of the album without defining it or fully revealing what is going to come next. After this opening, the album blooms, dew-spotted and intricate. Prelude uses a similarly patterned guitar and adds some birdsong to the mix, but the real magic happens when the vocals start. There is a quiet intensity and a scratchy androgyny to Kural’s singing. It feels papery, delicate, but not to the point of weakness. The words are born up – not entirely engulfed – by a very fluid, organic take on kankyō ongaku, the kind of environmental ambient music inspired by Eno, perfected by Hiroshi Yoshimura, and most recently updated by artists like Green-house.
It is this combination of folky melodicism, highly distinctive singing and refreshing neo-ambient backdrops that make Kural a unique force. Moon in Gemini is one of those albums that wears its apparent simplicity as a cloak, disguising a host of concepts, implications and influences. The closing track, Most Beautiful Imaginary Dialogues, is directly inspired by the poetry of Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo and seems to exist somewhere between melody and natural speech, between folk music and anharmonic clusters of sound.
A song like Almost a Ghost is a disconcerting dream filtered through the gauze of a lullaby melody. Here, a piano refrain recalls the nostalgic minimalism of Satie. Grown One Iota and its mirror-tune, After a Rain, are warped music boxes, the sort of tunes that the word ‘liminal’ was invented for. Interlude is awash with background ambience and oceanic imagery, and Mistaken For a Snow Silent marries impressionistic keys to globular synthetics before Kural’s restrained vocals transform the song midway through.
Kural is adept at capturing moods. Redcurrants is all bucolic dreaminess; Gül Sokağı has a quiet early-morning bustle to it. Elsewhere, more uncanny landscapes are formed: the dream geometry of a Di Chirico painting, perhaps, or the coincidental progression of a Calvino novel or a story by Borges. Behind The Flowerpots creates a glistening, surreal microcosm with the aid of Stephanie Roxanne Ward’s breathy singing and some misheard and reinterpreted lyrics from songs by Virginia Astley (one of the album’s clearest guiding lights) and Elliott Smith.
There are nods towards neoclassical music too: the sweeping strings and chirruping woodwind of Daywarm Birds and its more slumbersome sister song, Birds of the Evening, combine to create a peaceful Arcadian vignette. It’s evidently too simple to apply a single label to the whole of Moon in Gemini, and it’s also insufficient to tie it to a single mood or feeling. At times, it is pensive or meditative, but that doesn’t fit consistently: there are too many ideas flying around for that to be the case, too much invention. Quietly and with a distinct emphasis on care, Isik Kural has made one of the year’s most varied and rewarding albums.
Moon in Gemini (6th September 2024) RVNG Intl.
Order/Save: https://lnk.to/rvngnl104
