Ausklang - Kairos (2024)

AUSKLANG – Kairos (Past Inside the Present, 2024)

Kairos is the sophomore album from Berlin trio AUSKLANG, following the monumental, critically-acclaimed Chronos (Past Inside the Present, 2020). Throughout its eight movements, Fabian Koppri, Benjamin Sohn, and Simon Ansing play with concepts of relative time and entropy through a masterful balance of melodic post-rock and layered ambient bliss, adorning an understated frame of guitar, bass, and drums with complex, ever-evolving arrangements, ranging from glitchy electronics to classically inspired orchestrations.

Whereas the ancient Greek chronos indicates linear time, kairos describes critical moments of great potency and meaning. In the context of their compositional process, AUSKLANG employed this idea during the extensive in-studio improvisations from which they drew and expanded upon the most resonant ideas and themes. Title track, “Kairos”, opens the suite with a soft, harmonized flurry, as a supernova of spacious percussion and lilting tones emerges, draws back, and redoubles with arpeggiated synths and pensive guitars. Its final minute reaches a buzzing, thrashing crescendo, showing the full range of the trio’s dynamics as they move seamlessly from restraint into cathartic release.

“Time Stands Still” places vigorous, brushed drums under a panoramic interplay of plucks and keys, evoking an immense vista of greens and greys – the very kind of passage, in keeping with the album’s theme, where everything collapses into a singular focus. “Momentum” conveys churchlike reverence with shifting, sun-shaft warmth, as textures of varying grit and grace roll across the stereo spectrum. Here, AUSKLANG demonstrate a flair for sustaining and releasing tension through subtle means, displaying full control of the sonic environment, as the piece blossoms into a rapturous roar before sleeking away into a shadow.

“Yearning” originated as a sketch from guitarist Fabian Koppri’s teenage years, laying dormant until finding its home in these sessions, once more following the album’s thematic, temporal through line. Tonally, the percussion and Fender Rhodes occupy a territory akin to The Album Leaf and early Tortoise, creating an air of eager anticipation at the album’s midpoint, light on its feet, but still emotionally intense.

According to Koppri, “the process of recording, editing and mixing took place in several small stages over a period of two and a half years, and was like panning for gold nuggets in a wild river.” While distilling and developing their catalog of “kairos moments”, they were unrestrained by any one formula, instead allowing each song to breathe, glide, or become grounded through an intuitive, collaborative writing process. The resulting odyssey demonstrates the push and pull of subjective experience, equal parts patient meditation and in-the-red, kinetic rush.

The sublime sonic sculpture of “Ventus” offers a deeply-layered realm of hazy, drifting parts that recombine, with delicate intention, into cottony, overcast comfort. The exemplary “Pulsar” draws together all of the album’s key components – staccato synths, lively drums, plucked guitars, and slowly stacking textures – in a waltzing time signature, building into a slow, majestic eruption, after which swirling embers drift away, hissing into nothingness over an ashen landscape. Closing coda, “Zeitlos”, eases the listener back into reality with a slow heartbeat of glassy chords, and an array of flitting, incidental sounds, consumed once again by uncertainty and gradual decay as its final moments fade.

Across its varied topographies, Kairos is an album of accomplished craftsmanship and vast beauty. In line with AUSKLANG’s guiding vision, it is also an uncommon document of “captured time” that condenses years of diligent work into a profound aesthetic statement, offering something timeless in its search for meaning among the rigors of the seasons.

RIYL: Labradford, Tortoise, Dirty Three, Hotel Neon, The Sea and Cake, The For Carnation, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Balmorhea, Explosions in the Sky, Eluvium


All tracks written and performed by AUSKLANG. Mixed and produced by Fabian Koppri. Mastered at Schwebung Mastering by Stephan Matthieu. Fabian Koppri Guitars, Synths, Mandolin on Burning Bridges. Simon Ansing Bass, Synths, Rhodes. Benjamin Sohn Drums, Percussion, Piano on Ventus. Cello on Zeitlos by Anna Koppri. Flute on Yearning by Raphael Peters. Artwork by Benjamin Sohn. Recorded at Castle Studios Röhrsdorf and various recording locations in Berlin