Lord Kesseli and the Drums play slowed down, electronic club music, or in other words synthetic Science Fiction with analogue raging sounds. The Swiss artist Dominik Kesseli makes musical implosions rise in to striking Phoenixes. Nebulized dream phases meet declarations of love in all of the six pieces of this first, self titled release of Lord Kesseli and the Drums. It sounds as if a pitch black soapbubble was colliding with a golden planet somewhere in the universe and as if one would pull up that fine dust through the nostrils that would rain down on to the earth. Too crazy? You don’t have a clue…
This exciting Album is hardly recognizable at first sight, for shiny surfaces will unsuccessfully be searched on the EP „Lord Kesseli and the Drums“. In exchange, one approaches upon a lot of furrows and trenches, edges and cliffs, jungles and echoes. The 30-minute long emotional roller coaster illustrates our desperate eagerness for support. It begins with „Arnold“, a forceful anti-popsong, that celebrates the fragile beauty next to furiously distorted guitarsounds. „Fade“ manifests itself as a massive, dragging and pleading song. The journey goes on through the valleys of desire („Kid“), the seas of helplessness („MDMA“), steppes of despair („Pure Emotion“) and further on through the urban jungle of ignorance („Siri“). During the whole EP, a touch of church music can be heard, for Lord Kesseli embeds his sound in to sacred seeming echo chambers on a cussion of choral singing.
Bands, who become a talking point, before they have been washed up by a wave from the digital ocean towards the public, are either especially interesting or especially boring. This duo from St. Gallen obviously belongs to the first group. Lord Kesseli and the Drums was formated in 2014 by Dominik Kesseli (Stahlberger, A Crashed Blackbird Called Rosehip, The Masked Animals etc.). Together with Michael Gallusser (Stahlberger, Kaolin, etc.), Lord Kesseli and the Drums create involved soundscapes with drums, guitar, electronic bases, synthesizer and pre-produced samples. Over these soundscapes they build forfeited cloud-castles and behind these locked doors, stories of human manipulation through consumption and economy, politics and religion are told. The songs were produced at Michael Gallussers QFLM-Studio in St. Gallen and the EP will be released on Vinyl and Digital in spring 2016 with help of the quality label Ikarus Records from Zurich.