Viola Klein
-Confidant
Viola Klein’s records are supremely earthy and astrally inclined. In her DJ sets, she navigates with harmonies through a music selection that combines experimental house from the US Midwest, West African polyrhythms, and music in the tradition of Can from Cologne. Klein was invited to shape the sound of a club night alongside Kampire and Nídia. She has collaborated with Unity Fellowship Church New York, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Ndongo Samba Sylla, the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center in Detroit, Julion De’Angelo, and Whodat. For her own party series, originally called Bring Your Ass and later No Adoration, No Humiliation, she invited artists such as Aaron Carl, K15, and Kyle Hall when he was just 18 years old.
Her latest solo release, Confidant, offers a fresh approach to deepness.
Thanks to Beatitude Zachary G. Jones, reiheM, Peter Abs, Gunnar Wendel, and Georg Odijk.
reviews
Jazzy, vertiginous house music.
The producer and filmmaker Viola Klein makes house music that, with a trained, jazzy hand, knocks the tropes of the genre off its axis. The artist’s new three-tracker demonstrates her talent for coloring both inside and outside of the lines. Opener “Boldness” has a vertiginous swing; when paired with drunken MIDI brass, the track hits like a foggy stroll through a cruise ship corridor. “Snooze” is just as—and excuse me here—liminal. It pulls from and abstracts the house music playbook. The track’s outro interplay between cymbal sizzle and piano drizzle pulls it out of dance music entirely. Closer “Love in Life” moves with a gospel-indebted double time pump. An inspired set.
www.ninaprotocol.com
House auteur Viola Klein returns to meakusma with another imaginative, spiritual set that deepens familiar Midwestern grooves with lopsided off-grid rhythms and fictile synth vamps. RIYL Galcher Lustwerk, Nídia, DJ Sprinkles or Whodat.
Known for her wide-reaching DJ sets – where she’s as likely to drop Don Cherry or Can as she is Kyle Hall or Justus Köhncke – filmmaker, promoter, producer and writer Klein brings the same thirst for fusion and hybridity to her productions. ‘Confident’ is rooted in the jazz theory she absorbed as a youth, but those elements – snipped from the spiritual sounds of the ’70s – are buried in recognizable deep house aesthetics. On the 12-minute ‘Boldness’, she redirects the flow of sound module horns and woozy electric piano chords with rattly percussion that sounds as if it could capsize the rhythm at any moment.
‘Snooze’ is even smarter, with a stumbling, stifled bassline and organ stabs that sound as if they’re about to form a straighter line before Klein cuts to a muted, hissing piano solo. ‘Love in Life’ is the most traditionally functional track on the set, and even here Klein plays with our expectations, queering a rolling, propulsive beatbox cycle with skewed stabs and time-fluxing M1 improvisations. It’s jazz, just not as you know it.
https://boomkat.com