On Primer, Gothenburg musician The Keep shares stylistic trappings with the early cinema of Michael Mann. The cover of Primer depicts an apartment collaged from sources which clash yet somehow cohere. A floating, untethered vaporwave nightmare resembling Will Graham’s dreamlike beach apartment from Mann’s Manhunter. Its musical components are as loosely associated. Combining traditional Indonesian instruments with drones and synth washes recalls the futuristic prog of Tangerine Dream — the band which provided Mann’s The Keep (a curious namesake) with its soundtrack.
Oliver Knowles, the artist behind this The Keep, describes the genesis of Primer in ‘intrusive thoughts, anxieties, and a lingering sense of dread’. But like the Balinese gamelan from which it draws inspiration, Primer finds calm in chaos. The tone is eerily soothing — the perspectivised zen which can follow huge upheavals and tragedies. Primer presents an adverse world, but not a cruel one. Knowles never stoops to cynicism, or loses appreciation or gratitude for the world’s beauty.
Track titles are disarming, even humorous. ‘Fatberg’ and ‘Barry Manny Drone’ might not look out of place on a Pink Guy tracklist. But this doesn’t speak to a flippancy on Knowles’ part. Both tracks are utterly transcendent. Respectively frantic and still, they each scratch a different atrium of the heart.
Primer is stylish — that much is immediately clear. But what’s surprising is how much the EP reveals under closer scrutiny. On the surface, it’s a jumble of wildly different ideas and sounds. It’s a placeless room in which indoor streetlamps illuminate antique furniture. It should be fraying, bursting, falling apart at the seams. But keep digging , and you find the glue holding it all together.
Primer will be released on 6th December. Stream single ‘The Cub’ here.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe