Gondwana Schallplatten & CDs

Review: West London's Kessoncoda are the duo of drummer Tom Sunney and keyboardist Filip Sowa. Standing firm between acoustic tradition and electronica, they're founded on a unique blend of melodic, ostinato-laced piano and unwavering drums, fastening a new sond that fuses lilting, lullabying electronica and spiritual jazz. Having long shared a studio setup at the bottom of Sunney's garden, Outerstate was born of curiosity, and a shared tendency towards and taste for the more wondrous ends of jazz, comparable in sound to that of their labelmates GoGo Penguin and Portico Quartet. The mood of the album is captured in the band's comment: "this feeling of being within a group of friends, and you're chatting, and you're physically there but mentally you're not at all / you're somewhere else, a really weird state of being." We'll hazard that this could mean a state of flow; one that is almost impossible to find oneself not in, whether listening to the detuned upswell-ecstasies of 'X Is Closer To A' or the fully textured, metrically moded piano threnodies of 'Greyscale'.