»Ett« is Klara Lewis’ first album. Basically, it is her first release ever, if you don’t count the EP »Ett« from 2012, on which she initially released three of the ten tracks collected here through Bandcamp. If you haven’t heard the name Klara Lewis before, you can be forgiven. Her father, Graham Lewis, conversely, is better known and pretty much made a name for himself with the band Wire. This may also help to explain how Klara Lewis landed her debut at a »big« address like Editions Mego without further ado – her father is also represented by them in one way or another. Yet she doesn’t have to hide behind anyone else’s name with her music. She used field recordings for her songs, which she recorded in Sweden, Turkey and Germany, among other places, without letting them appear too much like environmental sounds. Klara Lewis’ wordless stories seem to consist of little more than a calm, almost grooving pulse over which she causes a multitude of layered elements to swell and ebb so discreetly that the changes over time remain extremely discrete. As a reference, you could cite the reduced dub of Basic Channel, which in Klara Lewis’ case is merely used as a kind of narrative technique far from any club context. Laconic and minimal, but formulated as captivatingly as if she had invented these means all by herself.
Ett
