Clesse – Clesse (Café Kaput)

Jon Brooks’s latest project for his Café Kaput digital label takes a left turn into techno and acid house, and is just as thrilling as anything he’s done

Whether Proustian moment or acid house flashback, I experienced something when listening to Clesse for the umpteenth time in a row recently. Everything dropped away and I came unstuck in time. There I was, a teenager playing a techno record on my old decks. The surroundings were indistinct and I could feel the music rather than hear it, but it was nevertheless as if I was there. Then I wasn’t.

The music of Jon Brooks has the ability to transport listeners to other places. From his Ghost Box office of information service The Advisory Circle, through the twilight marvel of Shapwick and others for Clay Pipe Music to the Applied Music industrial library sounds on his own digital label Café Kaput, Brooks’s work always breathes life into whatever sonic space he elects to occupy. His production is consistently warm, detailed, yet open to the moment and endlessly surprising. That Brooks’s latest project Clesse takes a left turn into techno and acid house and is as brilliant as anything he’s done to date, should probably not be a surprise to anyone familiar with his output.

The dank slow rave of “Recurring” opens proceedings as a past life experienced in the present. You have already lived this and are living it now. It’s basement music where the basement is a vast chamber that defies the laws of space. Electronic groans sweep through its terrain like the rebirth of a dead star. “Gehm” grows out of minimalism into liminal bleep and bass that traverses synaptic passages; repeating loops and turns become hypnotic. There’s a dream acceleration that seeps in, cracking open the void across the most delicious acid squelch you’ve heard in forever. Think LFO and Basic Channel escaping that basement beneath old stars. 

“My Favourite Apparatus” is the house that Jon built – and built, and built. The steady throb stays the same, yet adapts and travels. Release is spectral, barely apparent, but satisfyingly just there nonetheless. By folding time in on itself, it prefigures early Daft Punk and sends the French duo into a lost future. Vocal lines and rising synths punctuate the stripped down house music of “So Kate”. Imagine a piano anthem from an early 1990s Sasha set cored out to free a tear of inspiration, then reconfigured as an electronic transmission carrying echoes of its previous existence.

Brooks pulls in a favour from the Black Mill on “Yara”, a collaboration with the figure behind Pye Corner Audio known as the Head Technician. “Electronic Rhythm Number Eighteen (retransferred by The Advisory Circle)” from Pye Corner Audio’s Black Mill Tapes Vol. 3 and “Cloud Control” from their Ghost Box Study Series 7″ are heavy repeat-listen personal favourites. So any occasion where these two cross musical paths is cause to get ecstatic and “Yara” is no exception. The track expertly builds shifting moods out of subterranean bass, clipped half-speed techno beats and shimmering synth lines. “Yara” infiltrates consciousness and hijacks enjoyment filters.

The haunting of acid house is apparent on “Zauberbol”, with its stark architectural lines and Roland-induced prefrontal cortex bypass system. It’s the music for patients etherized upon tables locked into dream-within-dream states. Whereas “Lyricamelodie” is the film running out, images spooling backwards; abstract techno performing inception on itself. Forward momentum is not abandoned however, as Brooks seems to stage a new beginning as he draws things to a close.

Clesse feels somehow akin to those self-sufficient and self-fulfilling time travel loops in science fiction films from La Jetée to The Terminator. Its sonic world feels as lived in and inevitable as it is brand new and ready to be explored.

cafekaput.bandcamp.com