Suzanne Kraft - What You Get for Being Young

Pitchfork 80

There are times—times of year, times in life, times in an election cycle, maybe—that an escape is needed. Or a cushion for a weary head. Or a curtain to block out the world. Ambient music is often good for that. It can be comfort music, security-blanket music, spark-a-joint-and-go-to-sleep music. As Kevin Drumm once put it, in a song title from his 2009 album Imperial Horizon, “Just Lay Down and Forget It” music.

But some ambient music manages to stretch, however gingerly, beyond those fallback modes. It can soothe, yet still make you curious. It can calm and unsettle in equal measure. Brian Eno said that ambient music should be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” But what gets forgotten in that formulation is that ambient music, at least the really good stuff, should also be as interesting as it is ignorable.

You may find yourself replaying a piece of music like that multiple times in a single sitting—not just because it’s appealingly immersive, but because every time it plays, there’s a question that goes unanswered. It might be a question you can’t really articulate. It might have to do with process: how the music was made, or what time signature it’s in, or something more abstruse, like where the notes end and the effects begin. (These aren’t necessarily things you even think about consciously, but you tease them out nonetheless, tugging at them like you might with a bar puzzle while your mind was far away.) Maybe you simply don’t know quite how it makes you feel. And in some circumstances—say, for instance, that you know that you otherwise feel just shit-awful—that openness is a good thing. It creates a space of possibility.

Back in the early years of the decade, Suzanne Kraft—Los Angeles’ Diego Herrera, who today lives in Amsterdam—was making Metro Area-influenced house and disco, springy and dubby and slow, good music for the early or very late hour on the dancefloor. By last year’s Talk From Home, also for London’s Melody As Truth label, he had eased into a more contemplative mode: gentle synthesizers, clean-toned guitar, lilting cadences flecked with the LinnDrum’s telltale ping-pong thwack. Much in the vein of his label-mate Jonny Nash’s group Gaussian Curve, it was airy and spacious, and its final track, “The Result,” hinted at something even more ethereal in its beatless synths and fretless bass.

His new album picks up where “The Result” left off. Across much of it, there is almost nothing there beyond synthesizers, a few stray horns, and faint echo in place of connective tissue. Even the cuts with drums are essentially ambient in feel: In “Bank,” a song reminiscent of both K. Leimer and Shy Layers, a tentative drum groove frames watery synths and tendrils of guitar. Something about its overlapping layers makes it difficult to determine where phrases begin and end, and it sways gently back and forth, like a small craft rocked by waves. “One Amongst Others” moves with a similar sort of fast/slow tempo, and it counts out in five-bar phrases instead of four—a structural quirk that leaves you feeling off balance, even if you don’t realize it. Its cool, brooding chords, meanwhile, also have an unsettled air, shifting back and forth in search of the root note like a cat choosing a place to lie down.

Those are the most substantial tracks. “Fragile” offers just two sets of chords fluttering in counterpoint; quiet, scratchy bursts of distortion emphasize the outer surface of the sound, and a momentary bend in pitch gives the impression that the music is about to slide off the tape entirely. The wintry “Zé” is just muted tones and atonal squiggles that move like startled birds. And “Scripted Space,” warm as a freshly baked batch of muffins, is similarly minimalist, with arpeggios tripping up the scale and trickling back down through the delay chain. The sequence of notes is so fleet and slippery that you can’t quite fix upon them, certainly not enough to sing them back to yourself. The delay functions not as a crutch but as a channel, a conduit—not a way of filling space, but of revealing it.

The bookending “Body Heat” and “Further” are more lyrical—particularly the opener, with its mournful, drifting saxophones—but they’re hardly much more substantial; they seem more like conjuring acts than compositions. It’s striking how much Herrera manages with such meager materials. It’s not that the music is calming, which it is; it’s the way it gets under your skin, the way the ripples on the surface suggest hidden forces below. This short, gently melancholy album offers solace while rejecting the soporific. It is a cushion to fall back upon—one just springy enough, perhaps, to set you in motion again.