Kai Whiston - Quiet As Kept, F.O.G. (2022)

Kai Whiston’s new album ‘Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.’ is an overwhelmingly ambitious, devastatingly beautiful symphony. Distorted through a crunchy stereo of a decaying nomadic bus, echoed through a bleak moor, shrouded with a thick blinding mist. Whiston’s latest full-length release continues his trademark eclecticism while forging radical new ground, both sonically and thematically. From the banger-infused hilarity of 2018’s ‘Kai Whiston Bitch’ or the post-rock cascading landscapes of 2019’s ‘No World As Good As Mine’, Whiston’s ‘sound’ is never contained through a singular sub-genre or scene, but through a maximal approach to editing and sound design that creates arrangements which feel cross-referential and entirely new. It is this unbound perspective and commitment to building musical worlds that makes Whiston’s work feel limitless in its storytelling and leaves you wondering what’s coming next.

Whiston was born into dance music in the late 90s - a reality he confronts more than ever in QAKFOG. His mother and father were young ravers of the New Age Traveller community, who had spent their lives bouncing between the free parties of South England to witness the rise of Massive Attack, The Prodigy & Orbital. Kai’s mother, Helene Whiston, had an artistic touch, designing flyers and murals for the warehouse raves throughout the trance, hardcore & breakbeat movements. His father was a charming pub pianist and grafter, unfortunately led down a darker path towards the drugs & violence that so commonly devastates disadvantaged communities, sadly losing /his life to a heroin addiction early Kai's childhood.

In his own words, Whitson describes QAKFOG as creating a realistic exploration of his memories growing up as a New Age Traveller, his upbringing with raver parents and the impact of this community on his life - part-celebratory, part-critique, part-reality & part-fantasy. Whiston explains, “It took years of hindsight, creating a distance from my upbringing to view it all rationally, and in that I saw the story was bigger than my experience and was about the traveller community as a whole. It was through the impulse to write this project, hearing the stories from my mum (told throughout the album via phone interview interludes) and doing my own research that I found the beauty in growing up in that environment and accepted how it shaped me.”

Sonically, “Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.” offers a take on dance music that doesn’t rely on its nostalgia, with its primary function to be totally versatile, original and personal. Tracks are threaded together with live string quartets, arranged by Whiston and recorded at Air Studios, juxtaposed with otherworldly sound design to bring an cinematic intensity that lands somewhere between Bjork’s ‘Homogenic’ and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘Arrival’ soundtrack. The driving hardcore breakbeats of ‘Q’, featuring iconic punk feminist collective Pussy Riot, embrace the traveller raves of 90s - redesigned and repurposed to euphoric heights of futurism and fantasy. Throughout QAKFOG, Whiston delivers his raw and cryptic vocals - a technique honed in during his 2021 hybrid-alien themed mixtape ‘Drayan!’ -, offering an honest glimpse on the struggles and joys of his family upbringing. He remarks on the prelude of the self-directed ‘Between Lures’ music video, “It crept into the site like a thief / It stole the colour from our lives”, the ‘F.O.G.’ is sentient, an approaching cloud that creeps on all those in despair.

His self-directed music video for ‘Between Lures’ visualises the album’s concept, with Whiston struggling to pull the weight of a caravan up a hill using his bare hands and a rope. At the peak of the hill, he sets fire to the caravan and a spectacular orange hue dances and dazzles, the film bursting into colour for the first time. Kai explains, “I'm beginning to understand where my own habits and preconceptions come from, and starting to grow from what I spent so long to keep quiet, out of fear of judgement from others or myself. It’s as if a fog has been lifted.”