Leipzig's Gunnar Wendel, better known as Kassem Mosse, has built up a tidy reputation as one of leftfield dance music's most respected figures while keeping his person completely out of the equation. Despite using a number of aliases—KMOS, Paid Reach, Seltene Erden, the Siege of Troy—Wendel has never made an effort to stay anonymous, exactly. He's never cultivated mystique, never used his aliases as a shield. (That might precisely be the reason he's been spared the scrutiny that Burial's William Bevan has faced.) He sits for the occasional interview, though there doesn't seem to have been a new one in English in five years, and speaks thoughtfully and in great detail about his processes and his philosophy. He even maintains a Facebook page. Yet he's clearly content to remain at arm's length from contemporary dance music culture. He prefers living in Leipzig to joining the crowded techno scene in Berlin, and it makes sense; music like his requires a certain measure of isolation.
Even at its most straightforward, there's always been an element of mystery in Wendel's work. Loping house grooves may trundle ahead at 120 BPM—he's no stranger to the floor-filling anthem—but the background swims with wraithlike shapes, with creaks and clanks. Figuring out how a given track may have been made is largely guesswork, and largely irrelevant, too. The elements in his music seem less a matter of intention than tidal happenstance, like barnacle-studded scraps of plastic washed up on the beach after a storm.
Wendel used to specialize in beaten-up and broken-down house, favoring figures suggestive of a note hastily scribbled in the dark—the torn scrap of crumpled paper bag smoothed flat against the knee of someone's Levi's, the ballpoint pen poking halfway through the rough, pulpy edge—yet still legible as dance music. But he has increasingly abandoned dancefloor conventions as he has moved further out. On Disclosure, his first album for London's Honest Jon's label, and his first long-form studio output since 2014's Workshop 19, he might be mistaken for an entirely different artist than the one who produced warm, bittersweet tunes like “578” and “Thalassocalyce.”
The album covers plenty of ground, from his typical slow-motion house ruminations to tumbling, footwork-tempo dynamos, but nearly half the album's tracks are thorny synthesizer sketches—fistfuls of gurgle and ping, sometimes beatless, sometimes accompanied by tangled drum-machine patterns that tie the math-processing parts of the cortex up in knots. The opening “Stepping on Salt” gives us an idea of the kinds of tones to expect: sizzling, squelching analog waveforms yoked to broken-clock arpeggios over which the spirits of Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire loom large.
Even the most overtly rhythmic cuts here warily skirt the edges of the dancefloor. “Phoenicia Wireless” is the kind of pensive, toe-scuffing house track that Wendel can probably crank out in his sleep, but the beat doesn't start up in earnest until nearly two-thirds of the way through, and it's forever on the verge of being swallowed up by hi-hat bursts that clatter like mid-century newsroom typewriters. Woe to the careless DJ who throws on “Aluminosilicate Mirrors” without taking a good, hard listen first: A few minutes in, the tempo starts drifting upward without warning, turning the frenetic footwork groove even more hair-raising.
“Collapsing Dual Core” is one of the album's fastest, most unencumbered cuts, playing contrapuntal synthesizer lines against a TR-707 programming, and there's no arrangement to speak of, just a ceaseless series of tweaks to a few fixed patterns—a live jam par excellence. It tells you a lot about Wendel's method. Many musicians might have used what he's assembled here as the building blocks for something more finessed; they might have added more elements, woven emotive samples into the mix, teased out a harmony or two. Not Wendel: What you hear is what you get, and even the spindliest, most skeletal jam is exactly that and nothing more. It has no interest in meeting you halfway.
And that's one of the things that's so weirdly satisfying about Disclosure: It feels honest, and it feels true to the standards that Wendel has set for himself throughout his career. For all its quirks and austerity, Disclosure doesn't feel like the work of someone who's being intentionally difficult. He's simply following his own path. The rest of us are free to follow if we wish.
