#metavari

The largely forgotten catalog of library music in the late 1980s, early 1990s, is such a treasure trove of inspiration. FM Synthesis at the top of its game. It's almost impossible to remove a lens of New Age nostalgia from the fragile sounds that were utilized in this short window of electronic music history. KPM Music is such a profound resource when in need of inspiration for a jarring left turn or an arpeggiated sequence that my brain just can’t wrap itself around without a nudge. Here are ten of my most favorite albums from the KPM Music library in no particular order.

David Vorhaus — “Mind Games,” 1990

Pans, flutes and chiffs for days. And yet that's only a fraction of the remarkably wild experimentation Vorhaus takes you through on this 1 hour long collection of stock music.

Keith Mansfield — Circles, 1985

Keith is one of the best there is. Circles is 26 drumless tracks of abstract sequencing and fantasy soundscapes yet drenched in melody.

Richard Myhill — “Secrets,” 1989

“Secrets” is such a great hybrid of electronic, acoustic and new age music.

Tobias Becker — Science and Beyond 1, 1993

What’s most likely meant to be an exhaustive exploration of “space sound effects," ends up playing through like some long lost hyperreality vaporwave relic.

Nicolo Bardoni, Stephen Warr — Music Beds 2, 1993

The title warns you it’s gonna span a serious width. Does not disappoint.

David Hewson — Research and Development Part 2, 1994

I have “Crystal Clear” loaded up in my live rig in the event something goes wrong and I need to fill the air while troubleshooting. David Hewson to set the tone during a stressful recalibration.

Keith Mansfield — Positive Solutions, 1993

Percussive staccato and howling digital guitars. Put that on my epitaph.

Bernd Roger — “Visions,” 1991

Will forever love the failed moments in 1990s synthesis where something wholly organic is attempting to be recreated. The fruits of those failures have given us so much wild intonation that we couldn’t have gotten otherwise.

Milan Pilar — “Space and Underwater,” 1993

Wonderfully captures the horrifying, yet still beauty of deep sea. Coincidentally plays through very similar to SEGA’s Ecco the Dolphin soundtrack.

Nicolo Bardoni, Stephen Warr — The Sure Thing, 1990

Soft Continuum is, in some ways, a retrospective for Metavari’s Nathaniel David Utesch. The composer lost his long-time musical collaborator Ty Brinneman to cancer in 2020, setting off a bout of reflection over his synth/new age project’s past. Soft Continuum reconfigures compositions from Metavari’s 2009 album Be One of Us and Hear No Noise in bright, rhythmic electronics. 

A large majority of these tracks have a conceptual arc, tracing the death and rebirth of a star. You know this only because Utesch tells you so, however. The music abstracts themes of collapse and regeneration into bright bars of sound, dissolving and decaying at their edges. Still, there’s a definite progression to the three “Arc” cuts, a sense of time and distance and change, as the music erodes to hiss and whoosh, then reforms slowly. 

These cuts are precise and richly textured, reminiscent of Jon Hopkins’ cosmic work. But they also have a positive momentum, a sense of drive and purpose that links them to rave-y, dance electronics artists like Fuck Buttons. The artist incorporates a range of live instruments, including heavily reverbed drums, bass and keyboards, into his pieces, but these organic sounds take a secondary role. The main action is in intricate overlayers of synth, MIDI and keyboard that interact in fractal complexity, as on the Tangerine Dream-ish “Mirrored Dance.” 

Not having heard the 2009 record — it’s pre-bandcamp — I can’t really tell you how much Utesch altered the music or whether the current iteration is better or worse than the original. It is entirely engrossing, however, in this latter version, like a sci fi movie created by extraterrestrials, glittering, abstract and inscrutable.