Modern Yesterdays

Kaki Kings Modern Yesterdays is the guitar magicians first studio outing in five years, and her debut for Cantaloupe Music. Her last outing was the digital score to her touring multimedia work The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, featuring her signature projection mapping technology -- wherein video images are projected onto the body of a large, white guitar she plays simultaneously. Modern Yesterdays was recorded in Brooklyn with sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson and Arjan Miranda as co-producers. The album title deliberately reflects the global COVID-19 pandemics before and after, made more poignant as King and her co-producers contracted the virus despite being quarantined. Modern Yesterdays offers abundant articulations of post-classical, jazz, folk, and blues motifs, and electro-acoustic influences. All of Kings musical hallmarks are present but are sometimes delivered in surprising ways. Her dazzling, poly-harmonic and -rhythmic approach is highlighted on the fleet, driving opener Default, where open-tuned folk and blues meet Thompsons expansive sound design. Her sonic architecture is not just sound effects. She specifically creates environments for, and that remain inseparable from, the musical canvasses King creates, using drones, delays, and ambient backdrops, as well as field-recorded and sampled sounds from the natural world. There are also showcases for the Passerelle Bridge here. Co-developed by King and luthier Rachel Rosenkrantz, the Passerelle is inserted under the strings of the guitars 16th fret. It turns any six-string instrument into a 12-note one that sounds like a zither, Japanese koto, or Chinese guzheng. It can be used for effects, or as a different instrument. The gorgeous first single Teek employs the implement as a compositional tool. While Kings right hand fingerpicks under the bridge, the left hammers on and bends strings above it, creating multiphonics. King delivers two harmonic melodies simultaneously as guest violist Ralph Farris (Ethel) accompanies. Combined with sound design, one can hear four separate melodies, rendered tenderly and dreamily. On Rhythmic Tiny Sand Ball Patterns, she combines the Passerelle with a nearly formless musicality as Thompsons sound design frames her guitar playing in bright, washed-out drones while treating Kings percussive use of the guitars body as a cavernous well of insistent, foreboding echo around a skeletal yet deeply moving whole-tone melody. Puzzle Me and Lorlir are classic King jams with sonic twists. Her deft, muscular fingerpicking rings across the middle- and lower-register strings amid a labyrinth of refracted sounds -- bubbles, wordless synthed vocal choruses, percussive reverb, etc. -- as she moves through intricate, driving, polytonal melodies articulated in several musical languages simultaneously. Closer Forms of Light and Death was arranged by Icelandic composer and synthesist Ulfur Hansson, and its the only track here to feature King on electric slide guitar. It touches on Eastern modes and blues forms with slippery electronics that unobtrusively underscore and highlight each weighty line. Even by Kings standards, Modern Yesterdays is remarkable: It extends the guitars role in contemporary music to one of nearly limitless possibility without leaving the realm of deeply pleasurable listening. ~ Thom Jurek