Premiere: Franz Kirmann – Your Tenderness

Music

Written by Joe Clay

Taken off his sixth solo album, Forget Me Not, on R$N sub-label Bytes.

Among the students is a little girl who wears glasses. She set them down on a chair before the class started, the way I used to when I was her age and taking classes with Madame Dismailova. You don’t wear glasses when you dance. I remember that when I was with Madame Dismailova, I would practice not wearing my glasses during the day. The shapes of people and things lost their sharpness and everything was blurry. Even sounds became muffled. Without my glasses, the world lost its roughness and became as soft and downy as the big pillow I used to lean my cheek against before going to sleep.

Franz Kirmann returns to Bytes for his stunning sixth solo album, Forget Me Not, travelling inland to explore buried emotions of longing and loss. The music of Forget Me Not is drenched in blurry melancholy, with fragments of melodies and disembodied voices reaching out through dense, textured clouds of sound, perfectly demonstrated by ‘Your Tenderness’, the track premiering on R$N today.

A meditation on past mistakes, past love and the passing of time, the compositions on the LP are akin to paintings, layered and still, the slowed-down voices from the deconstructed songs echo through heavy reverberation, becoming distant and sepulchral, evocations of a distant past. The melodies, half erased, become almost subliminal.

Kirmann cites My Bloody Valentine as a major influence on his work, but also artists from the British experimental label Touch, such as Fennesz for his work on granular sound and similar melancholic-centric productions, or Philip Jeck for his use of old records to conjure otherworldly musical textures.