Every Monday my mobile phone delivers a snide judgment on how much time I spend looking at its screen. It tallies the hours, but it’s all quantity and no quality. It doesn’t grasp when time dragged and when it slipped by, when hours were donated to the attention economy versus when I stole them from my day job. Close to a century ago Virginia Woolf captured duration and sensation in flux in her 1928 novel Orlando in a line Sunik Kim quotes in an essay accompanying her new album, Formenverwandler: “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second”.
As Kim’s essay explains, Formenverwandler seeks to explore perceptions of time and memory. Spread across two CDs and close to two hours, the album sees dazzling irruptions of electronics test the limits of how much information and variation can be stretched across or condensed into units of time. Where long-form compositions often let time flow evenly through them, Kim builds dams and weirs, creating surges of pressure and torrents of release. Her sonic practice could be summarised as computer music, but that only names the tool while overlooking the human invention that makes it spark.
The opening track begins with a reformatting barrage. ‘Confirmation’ works with similar components but unfurls more fluidly. ‘Fast Money Blues’ decelerates and blurs, compelling us to dwell in sounds as they warp. Closer ‘Amidst The Ruins’ is a befuddling denouement, condensing the previous two hours into three minutes and forty seconds by playing them back at 30x speed. Does it conjure how poignant moments that lasted a second seem much longer as we reconstruct them in our memories, or how the years accelerate as you get older? It’s a testament to how effectively Kim plays with duration that such questions arise so effortlessly.
Concepts aside, it’s also sonically thrilling – ferocious, ecstatic, at points playfully absurd. Kim herself highlights her research into Conlon Nancarrow’s elaborate player piano compositions as a key influence. A more recent reference point might be the radical approaches to using computers in the early years of the Mego label, when the possibilities in hardware and software seemed open-ended and hackable.
Formenverwandler, a German word for shapeshifting, borrows its name from a track on Der Zyklus’s II EP, a project by Drexciya’s Gerald Donald. On the surface, Der Zyklus’ track, a minimal drum machine beat underpinning liquid synths and lyrics about bending time and space, feels barely connected to Kim’s relatively maximalist work. Yet, like so much Drexciyan music, Der Zyklus evokes a temporal anomaly: future-facing while riding deeper histories. While the beat is constant and even, what sprouts from it feels anything but.
The irruptions in Kim’s music trigger an even more acute sense of forward and backward folding into each other. An explosion of energy that builds from the temporal distortions found in modernist literature, Detroit techno or radically programmed automated pianos, and plugs them into music which is almost overwhelmingly present. Time might be a constant, but that doesn’t mean how we apprehend it is. And when our time is quantified into a commodity that we struggle to keep ownership of, music that makes the seconds feel so alive is priceless.
