Kito Jempere - Part Time Chaos Part Time Calmness (2024)

From a club-friendly chrysalid onto deploying his wings as a full-fledged pop artist in recent years, Saint Petersburg’s Kito Jempere has enjoyed a journey unlike any other and his newest album, ‘Part Time Chaos Part Time Calmness’ live-documents the chameleonic changes / game-changing paradox experienced this year between his life both as a musician and as a family man.

Better known for his work as a house producer which has earned him accolades from prominent dance music outlets throughout well over a decade of intense work both into and outwith the limelights, Kito has for all that never been focussed on writing solely discoid material, throwing as much effort over the years into multi-faceted parallel ventures, far and apart from strictly dance floor-oriented functionality. Yet, from this partition between various projects and mindsets, this is through a radical shift towards downtempo pop and out of the 4x4 loop that Kito got to fully assert himself as a musician, embracing the rejoicing variety of tone and mood of his tender loves, secret and not.

The "movie I’ve never made but have the soundtrack for", ‘Part Time Chaos Part Time Calmness’ is the fruit of change as much as change itself. A return to the simple means of his young self, his old trusty guitar from his late teens serving as the backbone to ‘Killer Line’ and ‘Love Myself But I Can’t Make It Love’, and the natural development to last year’s ‘Green Monster’, which initiated these deep tectonic movements in Kito’s approach to his art, ‘PTCPTC’ is an intimate trip down the kaleidoscope of his present life. Joined up by an impressive cast of artists, including Jimi Tenor, Adam Evald and Hard Ton, Kito didn’t just bin his old persona, he took it back to where it belongs.

From the low-slung emotional folk of the opener, ‘Killer Line’, to the eerie flamenco-jazz hybrid ‘Before Music Dies’, via the broken soulfulness of ‘Put Love Into Your Heart’ and anthemic 80s balearic breaks meets coastal synthwave vibe of ’Sounds of Love’, the album pulsates with a refreshingly genre-unbound vision. To the naive, laid-back sonic bokeh of ‘Footsteps’, succeeds the left-of-centre cinematic narrative of ‘In The Countryside’, which includes some fun nods to fictional brands taken from Tarantino’s imaginarium (Red Apple cigarettes) or other movies like ‘High Fidelity’, after Nick Hornby’s eponymous novel.

Freed from gridlocked programming and impersonal tropes, ‘PTCPTC’ showcases a wide array of songs, beats, grooves old and new, some dating back to 2018 and improvised sessions with his 9-people Kito Jempere Band, all of which were finished within the same timeframe and with this all-inclusive momentum in mind. Through the epic synths of ‘Absent Ascent’, in revamping the universal classic ‘Over The Rainbow’ with Celebrine, on the appeasing ballad ’Shorespotting’ feat. Evald or in the waves-ready closing cut ‘Lovers’, Jempere tells a tale of hard-earned emancipation and life-affirming freedom.