Review | Cryptophasia (+ more) by KINBRAE
Sweeping emotions flow over fuzzy soundscapes
Cryptophasia is the third album from the internationally acclaimed and quite prolific Scottish twin brothers Andy and Mike Truscott under their Kinbrae moniker.
Having collaborated with many other rising stars of the contemporary ambient scene, they are festival darlings and regularly appear on playlists of discerning music lovers and alternative electronica or even modern classical DJs.
According to the liner notes of this album, “shifting focus from their previous landscape-based releases, Cryptophasia sees the band explore their relationship growing up as twins and how this has shaped and formed them as people both individually and collectively”.
In other words, it's a very personal record, whose sound is a rich spectrum of heavily orchestrated and manipulated sources, both analog and synthetic, either digitally or even in a tape-based editing, reel-to-reel, old-school BBC Radiophonic Workshop manner.
What feels novel is how these techniques and approaches serve the primary feature of this record, which is soaring brass instruments, mainly trumpets but also strings, whose raspy, muffled textures come across as melancholic, reflective, somber as opposed to their previous work, whose main preoccupation was the liminal psychogeography of lost rural Scotland and other sociopolitical observations translated into sonic aesthetics, like photographing a landscape through the delicate lace woven by personal interactions and local lore.
At its most contemplative, the music feels like drifting off on a raft improvised haphazardly by a collage of found sounds, arranged in a considered assemblage that amounts to much more than its parts, like the thrum of hyper-processed radio static, whose odd, subsonic glitches that occasionally provides an off-kilter sense of rhythm, while field recordings and recurring chords harmonize on an ever-expanding tonal scale.
In a compositional sense, the record is convincing evidence of how ambient music can adopt representational qualities and dramatic flair by happily co-existing with chamber arrangements, neo-classical aesthetics, and drone structures, reconciling this often emotionally austere genre with epic, grandiose gestures whose fierce sentimentality is supported by an emotionally generous, almost cinematic, ambition.
The first Kinbrae album, Tidal Patterns, was released by modern classical label 1631 Recordings in 2016, and it garnered a lot of critical attention for its epic attitude and glacial elegance, suggesting a cinematic soundtrack filtering splinters of musique concrete through the gauzy lens of contemporary romanticism as if the dissonant percussion of a forbidding Iannis Xenakis composition is revisited, and tempered via the symphonic bluster of Max Richter.
This impressive debut was followed by Landforms, released in 2019 by London-based Truant Recordings, a record which is much less personal than their latest release, suggesting wide open landscapes and windswept vistas with its static, floating textures of heavily processed horns, their blaring edges softened down to a faint whisper, layered upon itself until it resembles a diaphanous choir.
Kinbrae, as a project, transcends mere sonic exploration, delving into the intimate bond of twin brothers and their evolution. From landscape-inspired compositions to introspective narratives the duo's versatility and growth stand as a testament to the power of music to convey deeply personal stories through rich and evocative soundscapes.
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, March 2024