Klara Lewis's 'Opening' Is a Disarming Masterpiece of Reversed Acoustics
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Stephan Mathieu’s mastering is the quiet hero. The record moves between a thirty-eight-second miniature and an eleven-and-a-half-minute centrepiece, and the low end stays coherent across both — no small feat when the source material is acoustic instruments reversed and stretched past recognition. Andreas Kauffelt cut the lacquer at Schnittstelle in Berlin.
The Spatial Dynamics: Lewis works without a safety net, and says so: “I don’t use the grid system in Logic, and I don’t know the key or bpm of anything; I just follow what feels right.” The result is music that swells and decays on no grid at all. Acoustic sources — ukulele, piano, damaged field recordings — are deconstructed and reassembled, so a phrase will lock into a loop and then slip its mooring.
Standout Performance
Lewis on piano, on “Bud.” At ninety seconds it’s the shortest fully-formed thing here and the most exposed: fragile, unprocessed keys surrounded by material that has been put through everything. The strings elsewhere are played on a keyboard rather than by a section, which makes “Bud” the one moment where you hear her hands directly.
Why It’s Certified
The best origin story on the record belongs to “How Far?” — the monastic-sounding vocals are real: “A choir was doing vocal warmups and I was just standing around the corner and recording it.” Lewis names Lynch’s Inland Empire as the single work that shaped the album’s whole vibe, and the cover is a still from film of a Circa dance show, En Masse, that used her music.
Three tracks are older commissions — “Tide” for the 2020 Irrlicht compilation Dissolving Strawberry, “Drip” and “Feel” for Mika Taanila’s film Failed Emptiness — and they sit in perfectly. The Quietus made it Album of the Week, calling it “alien terrain that, against all odds, starts to feel like somewhere you belong.” At First Floor, Shawn Reynaldo found it “a beautiful record” that “takes the concept of glitch and stretches it into a lush tapestry.” Also, charmingly, the track called “Hardcore” is one of the prettiest.