Written by: Dave Cantrell

The question is how a song and its video treatment – or for that matter any creative thing – can be both riveting and emotionally spectral, can move through you like some cloud of imagined mist yet possess you as tangibly as anything with the possible exception of love and even that may likely pale in terms of mystique and wonderment. Now, it’s understood that certain song songs buried away in our heart’s repertoire might have a commensurate effect but pretty much without fail all such ‘personal jukebox hits’ link to specific life experiences via their lyrics and the modal structures to which those lyrics necessarily cling, ie your proverbial hooks and such and thereby worm their way into your psyche via a perceived similarity of those same life experiences between the singer and the listener. They are, in short, stored not just next to memories but are themselves as scrapbook-worthy as the moments they evoke from whatever stage of life they originated. But what of a work that does all that sans language, for that matter sans any ostensible presence of ‘hooks,’ that emerges like an aura quietly electrified as if it were the very hush of beauty in all its pain and desire and blissful uncertainty? How do we explain that? Well, thanks to the understatedly breathtaking work that Kramer and Japanese artist Kato Hideki have conjured, we don’t have to, seeing as the two, on the collaborative album The Walk, releasing tomorrow, August 23rd on Shimmy-Disc, have created soundscapes that shimmer with the mystery of mirages while being simultaneously solid as (ambient) rock.

Lest you think we’re overthinking all this, think again. We could spend paragraphs on one single, fleeting passage and not overstate its succinct eternality. What this makes us realize (again) is that music is being made these days in some corners that not only transcends expectation but makes clear the inextinguishable nature of the form. Subject it to nuclear conflagration, still there. Consign it to the silence of disinterest or even concerted neglect, still there. Should any of us need proof of the unkillable nature of beauty, here is testimony, unfettered by hype, inspired and, most importantly perhaps, honest to its core. As for the visual, there too is evidence of a level of devoted artistry that is too often lacking in the ceaseless flow of such that flood our inbox on the weekly. Meticulously assembled by Kramer from footage of Swedish silent film director Victor Sjostrom’s The Phantom Carriage, the piece, from its ‘morse code emerging out of the fog’ opening to its gentle fade into madness, “The Phantom” is a tour de force where that particular ‘F’ word is one of gorgeous, subtly-stated power, an accretion of the mysteries that lurk in our wake every waking day. It is, in short, a masterpiece of the most liminal kind. And while we didn’t intend to get too borderline purple here, sometimes a certain quality of sound can only be met with one’s best attempt at eloquence however much it may fall – rather inevitably – short. Thing is, Kramer’s been chasing these exquisite ghosts for some time now and not to little effect (those efforts have, in fact, been brilliant in exactly the intuitive way you’d expect from the guy) but in this work with Kato Hideki there’s something particularly translucent going on this time, some shift toward the sublime in the molecular structure or anyway that’s our best guess. “The Phantom,” while being as well-titled as any track we can think over the past year at least, is an almost prophetic title for the sort of sleight-of-consciousnes that’s on display here which in addition, we have to add, having heard the album entire, isn’t exactly an exception and, yes, that is indeed is a barely-veiled suggestion that you immerse yourself not only in the following but seek out the album from which it comes. Some wise person somewhere must have said at least the equivalent of ‘don’t miss an opportunity to experience beauty’ and from our vantage that’s exactly why such a person would be considered ‘wise’ in the first place and would be found with headphones on listening to – while watching – “The Phantom.” [pick up your limited-to-555 copies copy LP here]