Like all of you, as soon as I beheld Hep!Collective’s new Hylé release, I immediately began humming The Lemonheads’s “Kitchen,” because that’s not a song that’s easy to not hum once you think of it. But that’s an idiotic thing to do when you’re pulling a Hylé tape out of its mail packaging, no matter what the release is. Plus, KITCHEN, Hep!Collective’s KITCHEN, is as far from a Lemonhead release as I am from Paris right now. Or Italy. I mean, I don’t want to go overboard and say “Australia” or something, because that would be a bit too far, and besides, no one involved with the recording or releasing of this tape is from Australia. Let’s just say that KITCHEN is pretty far from “Kitchen” and get on with our lives.
But not before we take a listen to KITCHEN, of course, and hopefully enter into some meaningful discourse about it. Italian artist Lorenzo Peluffo has a couple Hep!Collective releases under his belt, and this is his first for the Paris-based label (and there’s the tie-in). Peluffo focuses quite closely on texture, and KITCHEN is no different than his other releases in that regard. The tag: ambient, of course, as sounds register as if they’re being broadcast from far away – or from your memory. The two sidelong tracks hover, there, where you can almost capture their essence, but before long they disappear, like a dream you had that doesn’t quite fully clarify. What kitchen? There you stand, in the room where everyone always congregates, as if trapped by the ghosts of their passage. Ray Lew makes it rain, and the drops whisper on the window. But you’re alone there, hovering along with the tracks, hovering along with the sounds of KITCHEN and the kitchen and Ray Lew and the Calle della Madonetta estate, communing with spirits, thinking in whispers. Is this how Hep!Collective views the world? Does Lorenzo Peluffo perceive everything as a future decaying image?
Regardless of how past and present come together for Peluffo in his mind, KITCHEN unfolds like an old photograph kept in a book, edges frayed, grains visible, imperfections embraced, just how the moment appears in our memory.
And no Lemonheads. Sorry Evan.
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