From the start, the logo of KTL featured a thin inverted cross, intersected toward its bottom by a large "X" and paralleled by an arrow that broke open at one side. On the covers of the first several releases by the international drone-doom duo of Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley and Peter "Pita" Rehberg, that insignia forced some shade of dark against another. On 2006's KTL, for instance, it was big and black, centered and dominant against a faded gray-to-grayer gradient. Two years later, for 2, it had been bronzed and almost swallowed by a sea of blacks and browns, suggesting a steady wash of inescapable darkness. O'Malley and Rehberg began KTL, after all, in order to score Kindertotenlieder (which shares a name with a Mahler piece and translates as "songs on the death of children"), a sort of hyper-reality play in which "a group of teenagers get together for a death ritual in the form of a black metal concert." Darkness doesn't only become KTL; it actually begat them.
The cover of V, then, looks a little bit like a mission statement: Against a white background, the excellent digital musician and artist Mark Fell adds fluorescence to the X, the arrow, and the cross, turning them green, pink, electric blue, and yellow. He then thickens the lines, so that, when they intersect, the thicket of color bleeds again toward black, light and relief escaping back toward KTL's typically despondent aesthetic.
The five tracks on the pair's first record in three years fit that multivalent image perfectly: With what's best described as a heavy glow, the first four pieces of V strip away most of the metal discord of those previous albums without turning the volume down or slimming the sound's saturation. The album's suffocating stunner, "Tony", wobbles in before a complex, textural hum-- a high, thin murmur countered by a low, slowly oscillating tone beneath-- floods the speakers. Across its 14 minutes, clipped sheets of noise occasionally mount the massive drone, pocking the veneer with tiny teeth of abrasion. Never quite still, "Tony" is a study in subtle motion above and beneath the surface, with shifts in the hum up top countered by sonar-like events and echoes bouncing throughout the bottom. The less stable "Study A" shares the same liminal qualities, constantly working to exist across boundaries-- motion feels like stasis, harsh feedback blurs into harmonious resonance, luminosity eclipses itself.
Stylistically transgressive, these tracks offer a surprising junction of various musical outfields: Those interested in the warped radiance of Tim Hecker, Christian Fennesz, or Yellow Swans should find entry points here, while the more minimal maneuvers of Thomas Köner and Keith Fullerton Whitman seem but a few slow steps away. And if it's the gravity of Sunn O))) that pulls you toward KTL (O'Malley is a co-founder, of course, while Rehberg has frequently collaborated with the band), these pieces are actually more monolithic than some of KTL's previously fragmented recordings. Impressively, V is expansive and sprawling, somehow lighter without being at all slighter.
All of these strains converge most clearly and contrastingly for the last two pieces, both collaborations with very different performers. On "Phill 2", Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson lends his steady grace to KTL's stately brood, resulting in a quarter-hour span that hovers between spaces both empyrean and abysmal. Strings grind downward while horns lift skyward, girded together by an inescapable but sometimes barely perceptible web of electronics. It's like watching two equal forces attempt to move in opposite directions, unaware that they are intrinsically and immortally linked-- a tragicomedy of divested best intentions. During the final piece here, "Last Spring: A Prequel", O'Malley and Rehberg finally give into that darkness at the center of V's cover. The piece takes the name of the latest collaboration between American author Dennis Cooper and French puppeteer and playwright, Gisèle Vienne, the pair responsible for Kindertotenlieder-- and so, KTL. "Last Spring" slices and scrambles the prurient voice of Jonathan Capdevielle as he reads a bit of Cooper text from the show in French. Beyond eerie, it's the sound of all the light being squeezed from the previous hour, a 21-minute arrow back into KTL's customary core of blacks.
