KooKoon - Nightfall (2017) [Hi-Res]

High Wire, Inner Earth, Magnetic Moon - over the past 20 years Kookoon has addressed places of longing and states of emergency again and again. While High Wire and Magnetic Moon were still meditative, devoted to floating, balance and magical attraction and Inner Earth was still an experimental exploration and collage of earth-immanent sounds, his new album Nightfall is clearly more concrete and urbanely set.

Nightfall refers to the blue hour, in which the day comes to an end and the night hasn’t started yet: the time between dawn and darkness. It is a mystically enchanted time of transition, a time between desire and oblivion, a time in which reality and opportunity meet, a time of suggestive force.

Kookoon is fascinated by this “blanking interval”, this time of vague outlines that leaves room for imagination and dreams, for an infinite variety of shades. He could never say that something or someone influences him; it is always the field of tension that tempts and fascinates him. In comparison, Nightfall is a reminiscence of California, where the shoreline is made up of fascinating diversity between urbanity, nature and mythology. With a metropolis like L.A., which - being extremely metropolitan and lying directly by the ocean, integrated into a staggering natural setting with snow-covered mountains and deserts in the backcountry - it has inspired songs like “Topanga”, “Redondo” and “Pierview”.

In contrast to the titles on High Wire and Magnetic Moon, which were characterized by detailed, almost minimalistic structures, Kookoon dedicates Nightfall to larger forms, expansive arcs of tension and developments. It also includes live instruments; different from previous albums, the drum tracks were recorded live by Max Bendel and further guests are guitarist Michael Rodach, trumpeter Paul Brody and the American vibraphonist David Friedman.

Nightfall is a soundtrack for the interim period, soaked in deep blue, the color of the ocean and the sky, the vastness and distance, of desire and the unreachable: a place, where the search is much more exciting than finding.