If a minimal synthwave band named after obscure characters from the written works of JG Ballard sounds promising, Kline Coma Zero should do just the trick in titillating your auditory equipment! Led by the experimental musician Tony Williams, who also works on the IDM project DRIL, and whose past efforts have spanned genres like noise and early industrial, here employs his hardware sequencers to run various analogue synthesizers and drum machines, while creating a vintage sound with post-modern intent! The artist will release his debut, self-titled LP Kline Coma Zero on June 12th via Seattle’s Medical Records, and today we preview the upcoming album with audio for the track “Photo Falling“, as well as videos for “Mannequins” and “Left Behind“.
Presenting bleak auditory visions informed by writers like Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gibson, Kline Coma Zero’s sonic choices in equipment and approach mean that the music also bears an analogue in the early European synthwave movements of the 70’s and 80’s. “Photo Falling“‘s cold mechanical rhythms seem haunted by a ghost in the machine as they trip and skitter off into clouds of electron mist, while arpeggiating bass cords and minor-key melodies set the mood for Williams’ deep case of existential melancholy. Part of what makes the music standout is the lyrical content, and here, the gnostic philosophic underpinnings of a writer like Philip K. Dick, check out The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, say, are evident in a vision of existence that sees our lives as a series of fading images trapped like “ghost(s) in time”.
The track “Mannequins” leads off the album’s second side, and it comes housed in a seamless plastic melody on mindless repeat, augmented by a bass-line that is leaking some seriously strong charge, as Williams levels a sobering indictment against our unconscious and commodified, cookie-cutter lives. The other song included here, “Left Behind“, first appeared on La Forme Lente‘s 2013 label compilation, Circuit D’Actes 3; and it carves searingly cold, gorgeous sonics from a wall of menacing machinery that seems to be rapidly gaining it’s own inorganic sentience, while Williams sings of a life of “no redemption”, and a fate that has “left us behind”. Existentially rigorous and sobering indeed, Kline Comas Zero’s visuals for these tracks are also necessarily stark. Often centering around a mannequin like figure or bust onto which Williams projects an image of his face delivering the lyrics, the videos conjure up memories of Max Headroom, or the eery visual dolls of Tony Oursler.
