Kai Whiston - new album "Quiet As Kept, F.O.G."
The album is an overwhelmingly ambitious, devastatingly beautiful symphony.
September 16, 2022
Distorted through a crunchy stereo of a decaying nomadic bus, echoed through a bleak moor, shrouded with a thick blinding mist. Whiston’s latest full-length release continues his trademark eclecticism while forging radical new ground, both sonically and thematically. From the banger-infused hilarity of 2018’s ‘Kai Whiston Bitch’ or the post-rock cascading landscapes of 2019’s ‘No World As Good As Mine’, Whiston’s ‘sound’ is never contained through a singular sub-genre or scene, but through a maximal approach to editing and sound design that creates arrangements which feel cross-referential and entirely new. It is this unbound perspective and commitment to building musical worlds that makes Whiston’s work feel limitless in its storytelling and leaves you wondering what’s coming next.
In his own words, Whitson describes QAKFOG as creating a realistic exploration of his memories growing up as a New Age Traveller, his upbringing with raver parents and the impact of this community on his life - part-celebratory, part-critique, part-reality & part-fantasy. Whiston explains, “It took years of hindsight, creating a distance from my upbringing to view it all rationally, and in that I saw the story was bigger than my experience and was about the traveller community as a whole. It was through the impulse to write this project, hearing the stories from my mum (told throughout the album via phone interview interludes) and doing my own research that I found the beauty in growing up in that environment and accepted how it shaped me.”
Sonically, “Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.” offers a take on dance music that doesn’t rely on its nostalgia, with its primary function to be totally versatile, original and personal. Tracks are threaded together with live string quartets, arranged by Whiston and recorded at Air Studios, juxtaposed with otherworldly sound design to bring an cinematic intensity that lands somewhere between Bjork’s ‘Homogenic’ and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘Arrival’ soundtrack. The driving hardcore breakbeats of ‘Q’, featuring iconic punk feminist collective Pussy Riot, embrace the traveller raves of 90s - redesigned and repurposed to euphoric heights of futurism and fantasy. Throughout QAKFOG, Whiston delivers his raw and cryptic vocals - a technique honed in during his 2021 hybrid-alien themed mixtape ‘Drayan!’ -, offering an honest glimpse on the struggles and joys of his family upbringing. He remarks on the prelude of the self-directed ‘Between Lures’ music video, “It crept into the site like a thief / It stole the colour from our lives”, the ‘F.O.G.’ is sentient, an approaching cloud that creeps on all those in despair.
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