Playback Head: Body of Water CS

On his second album for Hotham Sound, Vancouver-by-way-of Brazil artist Alexandre Klinke expands the lo-fi analog tape experimentation last heard on 2021’s ‘First Sounds’ into a fully developed sound world all his own. Acoustic instruments, children’s toys, field recordings, electronic textures, and the artist’s trademark tape manipulations draw us immediately in, but the glue holding it all together is Klinke’s deep and understated musicality, the product of years of work as a player of jazz and Brazilian folk. In true Hotham Sound fashion, the theme of the album is water; a place of comfort, grief, memory, and connection to the primordial past. Exploring this theme, the eleven tracks slip effortlessly between longitudes, evoking both tropical beaches and northern inlets, glittering tide pools and meandering rivers. On ‘Tropic of Capricorn’ and album standout ‘South Beach,’ bass, guitar and rhythm-box invite the listener into a lagoon of immense calm and reflection, while tracks like ‘Amphibian’ and ‘Memory Island’ are murkier in tone, with field recordings of animal life evoking darker estuaries of the mind. On the title track, a series of bright, yearning tones sink slowly into an ocean of magnetic tape distortion, eventually becoming indistinguishable from the sound of water itself.