Kassian - Channels (2025)

With their debut album Channels on !K7 Records, Kassian (Joe Danvers-McCabe and Warren Cummings) have come full circle, focusing on the warmer, sample-based, and house-inspired sonics that brought them together.

Kassian periodically revisited these initial pieces throughout the last five years until they felt able to journey deeper, using their rapidly developing craft and refined production techniques to build a debut album that momentarily steps away from some of their more club-focused excursions. “As we were writing, we realized that all the tracks had the unique potential to tell a story,” reflects Cummings, with Channels leading the listener through a series of different atmospheres and emotional terrains.

Essential to Channels is Kassian’s focus on time’s ability to reorient human perspective. Kassian worked on the album over an extended period, with instrumentation, field recordings, and percussion first constructed and then subsequently stripped away and refined. Channels contains their early love of tube warm, sample based sounds and live instrumentation as the foundation for this album. The working process for these rippling pieces used both sequenced workflow and improvisational arrangement, live instrumentation inspired by an array of deeper emotional content. Both members of Kassian experienced great personal loss during the period of making this album, and a tenderness is felt throughout the record.

At the heart of Channels’ ethos lays a patchwork of quotidian social connection, those which give colour and shape to our everyday lives. Pre-Kassian, a web of happenstance led Cummings to remix Danvers track ‘1997’, bringing in some extra instrumental sensibility from British musician and member of Ezra Collective, Joe Armon-Jones. This early moment in Kassian’s origin story comes full circle with Joe Armon-Jones contributing his languid and dialled in keys across the album and most prominently on the track ‘Aeolian Harp’, melting across the spectrum of Kassian’s musical register. In ‘Invision’ the beat and sample interplay creates a momentum, which stretches and limbers, glistening with detail in the periphery of the stereo image. The euphoric ‘Metro’ links back to Kassian’s experience writing for the dancefloor using more structured and openly emotive cues, in the rain.

Widening their net of collaborators they also enlisted Timothy Kraemer on cello, a neighbour Joe first met by chance on a chilly new years eve. Kraemer’s cello adds a range of soaring resonances focussed on texture, micro-adjustments and spontaneous improvisation. ‘’It gave it this natural improvisational feel as most of the recorded cello was done on the first take, a lot of Joe’s keys were taken from the first take as well, the first takes have that raw feeling to them’’, says Danvers. The contributing musicians were allowed to interpret the music they were hearing rather than being verbally directed. This is further reflected in the natural themes both nominatively and through field recordings which Kassian used throughout Channels. In the piece ‘Spring’, field recordings of birdsong and cascading deconstructed rave-like samples mounted with cello and keys signal the portal opening to the latter part of the record.

Channels flows, with the moments between the start and end of each track standing as ecotones, creating distinct zones outside of each songs’ integral structure. ‘Sun’ picks up with a lightness, a mood which spreads its rays across the audible spectrum all the way through to the bubbing, submerged atmospheres of ‘Joss Bay’. Rolling through to the end of Channels ‘Sunset Park’ increases the pace with a faster steppier moment, throughout the record Kassian reference these different locations which draws together a fictional world for the listener. With its layered cello and arpeggiators and vocal sampling, ‘Peech Blue’ builds creating atmospherics which fade into static and the finale of the record ‘Limoncello’, a cerebral digestif for fading into a warm summer evening.

This record is an earthy thing, its naturalistic track names evoking recognisable and cyclically familiar moments, Kassian have provided a map for the listener at the forefronts of their minds. Channels has a flow and a depth to it allowing listeners to return and use it to reorient themselves, bringing new meaning to each unfolding moment.