No End by Rahel Kraft

released May 13, 2021

Boomkat review:
Rahel Craft's "No End" is a gorgeously fragrant listening experience - subtle electroacoustic soundscapes assembled from synths, sparse percussion and processed field recordings. Not a million miles from Christina Vantzou's "Multinatural" or Perila's brilliant "How Much Time it is Between You and Me?".

Producing good electroacoustic music isn't easy, but Rahel Kraft offers an expert hand, having cut her teeth on the Euro jazz and improv scene. 'No End' is a restrained record, and finds Kraft fudging the lines between electronic sounds and acoustic, the natural world and her sci-fi dreamscapes. It's hard to tell which instruments she's using, if any, but voices and woodwind-ish drones emerge at times, and organic percussion occasionally beats from beyond the darkness.

It's Kraft's environmental recordings, sometimes personal and homely and sometimes more difficult to place, that really push her compositions to the next level however. These sounds - variably watery and organic, like rain and washing streams, or industrial clanks and scrapes - add so much character to the music that they're almost like another instrument. Really excellent stuff.

BIO:
Rahel Kraft is a sound and performance artist born and raised near Lake Constance. Her interdisciplinary work is situated in the counterpoint between sound, movement and space, blending sonic fiction with environmental acoustics. She works with organic and electronic textures, visual media and voice, often via processes as conceptual composition, field recording, deep listening and experimental recording techniques. Collaborative practises are crucial for her work. She has an ongoing project with Japanese artist Tomoko Hojo and was many years active in the European Jazz and Improvised Music scene.