If the world were a little quieter, perhaps we’d hear it breathing. Kunrad, the Dutch artist who listens more intently than most, has spent years amplifying the hushed murmurs of everyday materials – water, paper, brass, and stone – transforming them into poetic gestures of sound. “Kleine Geluiden” (“Small Sounds”) is not just an album but a collection of sonic vignettes, each one an invitation to hear what usually goes unheard.
Kunrad’s background in composition and sound art has always leaned toward the tactile. His installations and performances have turned bridges into carillons, rainfall into percussion, and the chaotic tumble of metal tubes into a kind of aleatoric symphony. Here, removed from their original context, these sounds take on a new existence, unmoored from the mechanisms that created them.
The album opens with “Brass & Sand”, a piece that conjures the image of a forgotten brass band slowly dissolving into grains of time. The vibrations of metal resonate with a ghostly warmth, while sand – seemingly an inert, passive material – becomes an active participant in the sonic landscape, whispering, shifting, intruding.
“Stones & Water” is a lesson in controlled randomness. Rocks meet liquid with percussive intent, each splash and ripple a carefully placed note in a composition that never quite settles. There’s a meditative quality to it, as if the elements themselves are engaged in a quiet dialogue, unaware of being recorded.
The “Water & Paper Suite” stretches across three movements – “Prelude”, “Daily”, and “Convergent” – each one revealing a different aspect of this unusual pairing. Water, usually an agent of dissolution, interacts with paper in unexpected ways: dripping, smearing, saturating, reshaping the material’s sound. The pieces feel both intimate and expansive, like eavesdropping on the physical world in the process of change.
The album closes with “Bridge & Hammer”, perhaps the most kinetic of the set. Here, Kunrad’s fascination with site-specific resonance comes to the fore, as the bridge itself becomes an instrument, its percussive strikes ringing out like an urban gamelan. It’s a reminder that even the structures we walk on daily contain hidden voices, waiting for the right ear to hear them.
Listening to “Kleine Geluiden” feels like stepping into an alternate reality where objects speak in hushed tones and the smallest disturbances ripple outward with profound significance. Kunrad doesn’t demand attention; he merely suggests that perhaps we’ve been listening wrong all along. This is music for the patient, for the curious, for those who understand that a single drop of water can, in the right circumstances, sound like a waterfall. Vito Camarretta
via Chain DLK