Kylmyys

‘The Eternal’, a Joy Division tune from Closer, is interpreted with a combination of mechanistic and human elements. This is music intended to bridge the flesh/ metal divide, with its slow, lugubrious march of sadness and its laminar mediations, its simultaneous echoes of the future, and of ecclesiastical early music. The flipside drops us into a warm soup of comforting pads and urban anaesthesia, structured first by a rigorously simple mid-register piano melody, and then a series of subtle sonic manipulations of increasing insistence. Both tracks are very skilled and erudite essays in atmosphere and soundscape. - Oli

Brooding and melancholy seem to be favoured tropes for Kylmyys, judging by the other single I’ve reviewed from them in this roundup. This one is less dark, but equally creative, its timbres morphing and flowing like melted cheese around its downtempo beats. It’s a very understated, but very accomplished piece of progressive electronica. - Oli

It's not every night that you hear live music that reminds you of eccentric electronic-music composers Mort Garson and Igor Wakhévitch, but that's what happened when we hit up Vermillion Gallery for Art Walk last Thursday. The musicians in question are Seattle synth duo Kylmyys, who were dressed in robes and wore bird masks last seen on the Knife about five years ago. Keep an ear or two open for them. - Freebird Stairway

My intro to Kylmyys was a chance encounter in May at Vermillion Gallery during Second Thursday, Capitol Hill's art walk. They were set up in the back area, wearing bird masks and robes while hunched over synthesizers. The Seattle duo—Brian Kidd and Jason Chamberlain, who claim Oslo, Norway, as their hometown, but that may be misdirection—emitted an array of enigmatic keyboard washes and cryptic twitterings that evoked the malevolent majesty of Igor Wakhévitch and the sinister tonalities of Mort Garson's classic Black Mass LP under the Lucifer pseudonym. Their 2012 album, The Ice Breaks at Dawn, bears a Nordic frigidness that's at once unsettling and grandiosely beautiful. Kylmyys bring a new, bracing gravity to the term "chillout music"—as exemplified by their distorto-voiced cover of Joy Division's glacial "The Eternal." - Dave Segal

Kylmyys is Brian Kidd and Jason Chamberlain, ambient musicians and professional soundscapers (their website urges you to have them score "your next event or art gallery"), and this downtempo electronic track falls somewhere between background noise and the club. Call it music for chilled-out contemplation. - Andrew Gospe