Seasoned electronic music producer Chris Clark sounds like a man in need of a change on Kiri Variations. In the run-up to the release of his 10th album he praised acoustic instruments as “an antidote to frictionless digital music” and advocated for an “anti-muso” approach, sounding exhausted with both electronic timbres and conventional musicality.
The album started life as the score to the British TV series “Kiri,” a commission Clark has credited with inspiring new approaches in his productions. This may explain why the Warp Records veteran has swapped out his habitual synthesizers in favor of piano, harpsichord, strings, and voice, topped with a light sprinkling of electronics. Rather than sounding refreshed, though, Kiri Variations comes across as a labored work that can be both interesting and listenable but rarely at the same time.
Weighing in on the side of intrigue is “Kiri’s Glee,” which resembles an aural rendering of a not particularly inspired piece of naive art, its tasteful string plucks interrupted by a recorder line that is deliberately out of tune. This may provide useful color within the television show, which centers on the abduction of nine-year-old Kiri Akindele, but here the effect on the listener is nails-on-the-blackboard annoying, and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. “Cannibal Homecoming” walks a similar path, its opening minute marked by a vocal buzzing around, high-pitched and infuriatingly out of key, like a late-night mosquito attack when you’re dozing off to sleep.
The self-explanatory “Simple Homecoming Loop” is quite the opposite: a tasteful mixture of piano, strings, and electronics that circles around harmlessly, adding little to the tradition of piano mood pieces that Erik Satie would have considered revolutionary before shuffling off this mortal coil in 1925. You’ve heard this kind of thing before, many times: the kind of prettified sketch that AI algorithms will be knocking off en masse for Spotify dinner playlists by 2030.
It doesn’t help that the album’s palette is so limited. Even the more experimental songs on Kiri Variations tend to be built upon the same wispily tasteful blocks of acoustic and electronic sounds, with the mid-album duo of “Flask/Abyss” and “Tobi Thwarted” so similar in their airy ambience you could barely fit a licked cigarette paper between them.
Occasionally, Clark does nail the mixture of engaging and effective to create moments of itching disquiet that merit repeat listening. “Forebode Knocker” is genuinely troubling, an unsettling vocal loop infecting the instrumentation around it so that it curdles out of tune before your ears, while “Yarraville Bird Phone” has unexpected melodic leaps that send a delicious shiver up the spine.
But it’s not enough. Kiri Variations feels like an album that has lost its way: a soundtrack (though most of the music never appeared on the show) that shoots for terror but settles for unease; an “anti-muso” work that is far too conventionally musical. Clark compares the album to Roald Dahl’s short stories for its alleged witchy feel. But Dahl was never, ever dull.
