"Aris Kindt’s new album 'Now Claims My Timid Heart' is about as good as downtempo, ambient, electronic soundscapes can get."
Recent releases on Quiet Time, from Gi Gi’s Dreamliner to Aris Kindt’s new album Now Claims My Timid Heart, represent downtempo and ambient electronic soundscapes at their finest.
Recent releases on Quiet Time, from Gi Gi’s ‘Dreamliner‘ and now Aris Kindt’s new album ‘Now Claims My Timid Heart’ is about as good as downtempo, ambient, electronic soundscapes can get. It’s often not a music about bliss or ecstasy or zen. It’s not about vibe. But, it can be about waiting, and about wanting.
It can be about watching the landscape change while riding the train. Or as Meredith Graves reminds us, it can be about the delicate game of romance, of mental chess, that two people like Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská play for months or years before their bodies even touch. A sexual experience can happen even in just the words that are shared. Somehow, the act itself requires a back story for it to really be as great as it can be.
And I guess that’s how us humans really work. The idea of a thing can be more important to us than the thing itself, or at least it can make the thing truly special. On Now Claims My Timid Heart, it is these things that beg to be felt and to be understood, to be processed as memories and feelings encoded in sound rather than melody and harmony.
Noah Trapolino’s artwork depicts the complexity of our relationships, of a shared desire between two people that can both be tender and insatiable. Together we can feel complete, and maybe our shared happiness is still yet impossible. We’ve all been in love and somehow also deeply in pain because of it. It’s a depiction of two lovers (or are they fighting?) that would make Egon Schiele smile.
As the album unfolds, we have to grasp our world standing before us. On the first piece, “Saichh Sequences” , it feels like we’re opening our eyes for the first time, in transit toward Francis Harris and Gabe Hedrick’s transmissions. A low and steady tapping can be heard, like the sound of a rail car calmly skittering across tracks that stretch across interconnected worlds. I can’t help but think of the train car entering The Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
“Shake Loose and Fall” has some of the record’s most incendiary guitar parts, and some of the most melodic elements. Where “My Timid Sight” feels like a depiction of the working class haplessly meandering through corporate-captured life, this track feels like it sets that world on fire.
Sometimes, like on “They Have the World Behind Them” , everything feels like it’s in its right place, like walking into a vast room filled with people, a place where everyone instinctively knows you belong there, and you know you belong, too. And again, there can be a shared intimacy, a world of communication, between two people, even across such a big room.
“Time Measures” is more contemplative, more drawn in. As the world slowly turns around you, the sounds of children playing and people living their lives can be heard, but it’s the unanswered questions of life, the riddle of your own existence that has your attention.
On “Alter”, the guitar (or otherwise convincingly human pad) tells a story of a distant and almost completely forgotten past, and how it relates to an unknown future, one where we all cease to be. And what of the world at that point? We won’t be here. We’ll never know what happens, we won’t know if there is still love, or if there are people to be loved.
But, that’s just it. Now Claims My Timid Heart is not about the saccharine. “Sweet for the sake of sweet” ambient music is a dime a dozen. We can relegate that stuff to the elevators and the doctor’s offices and the other sterile zones where muzak belongs. My Timid Heart is the opposite of that. It’s an album that further cements Quiet Time’s explorations into complex, cinematic, human experiences.
‘Now Claims My Timid Heart’ is out now via Quiet Time. Buy a vinyl copy from Inverted Audio Record Store.
TRACKLIST
A1. Saichh Sequences
A2. Now Claims My Timid Sight
A3. Shake Loose and Fall
A4. They Have The World Behind Them
B1. Time Measures
B2. Letters to Alice
B3. Alter
B4. Removal Plan