A haunting but uplifting piece opens the album featuring the classic hallmarks that K. Leimer has become famous for, with light drifting piano punctuating the dense undercurrent of synth work and samples. For an artist releasing their 20th Solo album to continue to sound fresh and timeless is a statement to his growing legend. Spliced vocal lines add an air of earthliness to the heavenly piece, emphasising a sense of human fragility. Kerry is a legend in the world of experimental electronics and ambient with wide ranging press support from Pitchfork, Dazed, Ransom Note, XLR8R, Resident Advisor & more. His previous outing on First Terrace as part of their Split series was supported by Pitchfork, The Line of best Fit, Electronic Sound Mag, Dummy & more!
Yet, somehow, a significant number of people seem to feel that this time will be different. To some extent they are right. It will be infinitely worse. Irrational Overcast is preoccupied with the perpetual failings of human tribalization, of assuming dominance over nature, of choosing belief and ideology over objective reality. The impetus was brought into immediate focus by the destructive impulses and actions of such excrescences as the Trump Administration and his republicans, as well as the blatant dishonesty and bigotry of thousands more retrograde, ill-informed nihilists operating in and outside the pubic sphere. I do not profess that music — especially an experimental, lyric-free music — can change or influence such circumstances. But this is the context in which we now live, and this has shaped the music of Irrational Overcast — a coping mechanism for living under clouds of baseless beliefs and simplistic ideologies that disfigure and stifle what is an admittedly difficult though really quite lovely world. Music, to my mind, can not clearly express anything so literal, or metaphoric, or allegoric — but Irrational Overcast makes the effort to articulate the problems created by some enduring and banal aspects of human behaviour. Which is the reason it is built of lo-fi, deformed emergent or regressing or fragmented phrases, subsumed by distortion, noise, wow and flutter… and played with the understanding that there can be no more bedtime stories."
