Tristan Kasten–Krause is a New York based composer and musician. He has released the debut full-length called Potential Landscapes which is out now via Whatever’s Clever. According to the press release, Potential Landscapes was recorded non sequentially between 2018 and 2020, structured around meetups with collaborators who were scattered across the country. The sound they create is deceptively serene, made of tranquil hymns and long meditations, but underneath the surface ripples layers of different musical instruments and deep-felt emotions.
To write this music, Kasten-Krause turned to Éliane Radigue’s colorful drone music that blooms from a deep sense of intuition, Jon Gibson’s groundbreaking minimalist clarinet playing, Phil Niblock’s minimalist compositions that remove breath and bow changes to create unending sound clusters, and Alvin Lucier’s explorations of resonance and space. He formed each piece on the album by uniting the fragments of music his collaborators sent him, shifting pitches and removing breath and bow strokes, then mapping each note onto its own channel, using automation to digitally create sounds. This process was one he began when working with LEYA harpist Marilu Donovan on their duo record, Nowhere. But that album was made of music that was adrift without a home, the kind of otherworldly music that was meant to launch you into outer space; Potential Landscapes is music that has a place, even if that place is only imaginative.
The music of Potential Landscapes follows an emotional arch: It begins with the dawn of a new day (“Dawn Looming”) and all its possibilities, jumps to the intense feelings of ecstasy and sorrow (“Euphoria Cancel” / “From Thin Air”), and finishes with a simultaneous strength and fear (“Contra”). The album’s cover features the imagery of a black and white Icelandic mountain and hand-drawn rainbow, evoking a sense that there’s a hidden realm that exists beyond the horizon. Potential Landscapes reminds us that we have the ability to go there. Its infinite music transports us to heightened mental realities, and there’s an endless potential energy bubbling up from its glimmering sounds. Each contains a spectrum of emotion just waiting to be cracked open—all we have to do is choose which one.
Check the full streaming below.