Review: shedding – Flocking KF Variations

FLUF.

62 tracks, none of which breach the 30-second mark, designed for shuffle playing. If a linear album is like a roll of parchment, Flocking KF Variations is a rattling sack: each piece a marble randomly extracted from the bag, inspected briefly for the swirls of colour inside, then tossed over the shoulder to make way for the next. It’d be far too easy to deem these tracks throwaway as if duration was the only vector in the calculation of listening intensity. In fact, each stimulates a piping-hot jolt of concentration, my ears scrambling over the surfaces of the sound like slippery digits on an almost-dropped ceramic plate, driven to a heightened focus by the ever-imminent vanishing.

All of the pieces work with the same palette of sonics: synths that rebound and slurp, whistle and writhe. These constructs feel spherical somehow – a sensation perhaps rooted in those electro-caricatures of a ping pong ball plopped onto a glass table, which settles with a stammer and then rolls from left to right (or vice versa), each singing a spiralling error code as it moves. This textural continuity also raises another mode through which to understand Flocking KF Variations. When considered as a continuous 16-minute track, it becomes a shapeshifter whose molecular re-sequencing is triggered by the shuffle button. Track transitions cease to be “transitions” at all; those flashes of silence are instead the strips of Velcro between each splash of matter, ready to be ripped apart and reconnected anew.