music for clarinets and feedback

Neil Kleiner has spent the better part of two decades making music that resists easy categorisation. As one half of Names On Tapes, the experimental duo whose fourth album Ayin arrived earlier this year, he has built a body of work defined by texture, restraint and a principled indifference to genre. Music for Clarinets and Feedback is his first release under his own name, and it begins where Ayin left off.

The clarinet had been quietly accumulating presence across the Names On Tapes catalogue, reaching its fullest expression on Ayin. Here, Kleiner takes the instrument and gives it the whole canvas. Six composed works across 46 minutes, built entirely from multitracked alto and B-flat clarinet, sometimes close to its acoustic origins, elsewhere processed beyond recognition through electronics, glitch and degradation.

It was during his time playing alongside Steve Reid and Kieran Hebden, the drummer and Four Tet producer whose collaborative records remain some of the most celebrated documents of spiritual jazz’s contemporary revival, that Kleiner first understood what ecstatic woodwinds could do. That understanding is all over this record. Spiritual, devotional, at times overwhelming, the clarinet here creates worlds of emotion that survive every layer of processing applied to them.

The clarinet has a reputation for delicacy. Music for Clarinets and Feedback is not interested in that reputation. What persists through every processing stage is breath, the human signal that survives degradation, glitch, distortion and noise to reach the end of the record still audible. Just.