Klara Lewis & Simon Fisher Turner - 2018 - Care

Editions Mego – emego253

 Care is an unusually gentle title for an album filled with rupture, distant voices, corrupted rhythms and sounds that occasionally resemble machinery or weapons. Yet care is exactly what allows Klara Lewis and Simon Fisher Turner to assemble such unstable material without reducing it to chaos. Every harsh interruption has been positioned against silence, air or fragile melody; every found voice is given enough space to retain some trace of the life from which it came. The record’s four long pieces continually move between threat and shelter, making care feel less like softness than sustained attention to damaged or displaced things.

Lewis and Turner share a cinematic approach without supplying a fixed film. Turner’s long history includes soundtracks for Derek Jarman and other filmmakers, while Lewis developed her manipulation of field recordings partly through making short videos. On Care, environmental sound is not used as straightforward documentation. Voices, birds, street noise, radio fragments and musical quotations are cut away from their original settings, transformed and placed into new relationships. The listener recognizes human activity but cannot locate it securely. Each track becomes an imaginary place assembled from evidence gathered elsewhere.
“8” establishes that disorientation immediately. Swirling drones and near-silence are suddenly torn open by bass-heavy, machine-gun-like bursts, mangled dance fragments and flashes of conversation. The piece refuses to settle into either ambience or noise. Beauty appears, is interrupted and later returns altered by the interruption. “Drone” is comparatively patient, building a circular haze from dense rhythmic hiss and melodies that carry an almost medieval character. Its title sounds generic, but the track demonstrates that a drone is never truly motionless. Small changes in texture, pressure and distance keep reshaping the atmosphere from within.
“Tank” is the album’s darkest construction. Children’s chanting, rattling reverberation, stressed strings, radio static and Arabic-language singing pass through a landscape repeatedly disturbed by violent electronic impacts. None of these elements remains long enough to explain itself. They arrive like fragments of broadcasts received from several locations at once, leaving the listener to sense connections among childhood, tradition, urban life and warfare without being handed a documentary message. Lewis and Turner do not turn suffering into spectacle. The track’s power comes from how much remains unresolved and how carefully the human material is preserved inside the disturbance.
The closing “Mend” changes the emotional direction without pretending the preceding damage can simply be erased. Faraway voices and swelling synthesizer tones gradually create warmth, while the harsher collage techniques recede. To mend is not to restore an object to an untouched condition; the repair remains part of its history. That idea gives the entire album a hidden shape. “8,” “Drone” and “Tank” fracture sound into unstable pieces, while “Mend” discovers a way for fragments to coexist without disguising their seams. Its hope feels earned because it arrives after the record has acknowledged how easily environments, memories and people can be torn apart.
Care brings together two artists from different generations without assigning one the past and the other the future. Turner’s decades of soundtrack, pop and experimental work meet Lewis’s precise digital editing and transformed field recordings on equal ground. The result resembles neither artist simply visiting the other’s territory. It is a shared language of interruption, atmosphere and emotional montage, where an anonymous street recording can matter as much as a synthesized chord. The album keeps removing the listener’s location, but never abandons them there. Its deepest movement is from disorientation toward repair, carried out not through explanation but through the patient arrangement of sound.