Review: K.lust - Liven

Essentially, Liven brings together six beautiful pieces of regenerative, self-powering machinery. The rhythms spin freely like bicycle wheels, powering all manner of beautiful ambient lights and clacking wooden winches, which in turn – through a mysterious, levitational defiance of earthly physics – feed their energy back into the beats that cycle freely beneath. There are glimmers of the headier, amber-lit notions of electronic dance music, yet what makes Liven particularly curious is K.lust’s relationship with rhythmic emphasis. These tracks often ignore the dictation of the downbeat, surrendering to the fluidity of internal momentum and floating past the conventional structural checkpoints in the process. Even though most of these pieces fall under the 10-minute mark, there is a moment within each when I lose my understanding of how long I’ve been here, and for how long I might remain. Each of these pieces is a self-contained eternity, oblivious to age and decay.

I’m struck by mental images of prolonged transience and becoming: never-ending sunrise, synthesisers flickering on the brink of power failure. Perhaps it’s this sustained sense of promise that holds Liven within its spiral of infinite renewal, using the false imminence of change to keep each atmosphere in a state of blazing optimism and expectation, forever forcing the rhythmic hydraulics to keep burning for just a second longer. I should pay more attention to the melancholic hue of those waning synth pads, or the emptiness that gapes in every direction as reverb rinses the mouths of canyons and sloshes across the basin of deep space. Embedded just beneath the potential for change is the ultimate knowledge that Liven is trapped within its own samsaric return.