Klara Lewis: Opening review – enigmatic, ecstatic sound sculptures from a Swedish slowburn master

(Editions Mego)
Lewis mines beauty and intimacy from her minimalist blend of samples and rich instrumentation, sounding as profound whether they last 11 minutes or 38 seconds

The first thing you hear on Opening, the new record from Swedish musician Klara Lewis, is a grainy fog of ambient noise: the sound of waves, a roadside or perhaps just the creaks and echoes of the room she’s recording in. The whining reversed strings that soon emerge from the murk create a wistful atmosphere, but then things take a turn: the loop clips and distorts with strobe-like intensity; after several minutes, it cuts off mid-bar, as though it’s been unplugged.

This deconstructed, shape-shifting approach is typical of the self-styled “sound sculptor”, who has been composing uncanny instrumentals from a combination of acoustic instruments and processed samples since 2014. As always, she imbues the harsh experimentalism with real feeling throughout this gorgeous collection of tracks. On City, the lo-fi guitar loop and faint traces of chatter lend a sense of warmth and intimacy to the whooshing field recordings and churning electronics. On standout Vaknar, Lewis builds something soaring and beautiful, where the reverse tape effect creates a dreamlike wooziness and the high-pitched bursts of noise feel increasingly ecstatic, in the spirit of Joshua Chuquimia Crampton or early Arca.