Premiere: Kids Techno Continues To Perplex On New Album, Shorts
Dating back nearly thirty years, the recordings of reclusive electronic artist Kids Techno have been enticing in their arcane presentation. Cues are taken from post-punk icons, 1980s educational toys, and narrations recorded back in the nascent nuclear era, all coalescing in stitched-together sound collages or standalone bursts of expression. At times, a sense of intent emerges; at others, the compositions remain an abstract array, no clearer when examined up close or from afar. The solution to the sonic cipher, if one exists, residing solely in the mind of the artist known simply as KT.
It’s been five years since we’ve heard from this electronic ermite after 2020’s The Harmony Of Spheres and Ellipsoids, twin explorations of visual symmetry and geometric sound manipulation through sampling, remixing, and splicing. Now, KT is sticking its head up again into the music realm, emerging like a groundhog that sees not its shadow, but a tangle of sonic possibilities waiting to be unraveled. This time around, KT continues to embody a sense of deconstruction and reconstruction, a process that mirrors the perpetual cycle of creation itself. Disassembling the past to forge something entirely new, which KT has done time and time again.
The cloaked composer has always thrived in the liminal space between chaos and control, with recordings that push the boundaries of nuance and audacity, and that remains true with Shorts, the latest record from Kids Techno. Set for release on Tuesday, April 1 through Cherub Records, this new collection is as familiar an offering as one could expect from the work of KT, at times resembling a long-lost beat tape, unearthed after years of obscurity, while in other moments, presenting as a digital decay, a fusion of recordings, somehow surviving the ravages of time. Today, The Auricular is excited to premiere Shorts, offering an exclusive stream below and a glimpse into the album’s enigmatic sound world.
“Forget the world around you. Forget the people around. You are about to take a journey out of this world, alone with your own thoughts.” This archival recording from the 1939 World’s Fair drifts through the hazy shadow of “Alone With Your Own Thoughts,” the eighth track on Shorts, serving as a loose, albeit cryptic, guide to the album’s enigmatic soundscape. If taken at face value, the message and title suggest an approach to this record, one devoid of context, judgment, or predefined structures of loud and quiet, up and down. As the preceding track proclaims, “Sound is all around,” a sentiment that underpins KT’s entire catalog. Some pieces emerge as ephemeral wisps of melody, while others strike with jagged, avant-garde intensity. Attempting to distinguish between the two seems almost beside the point, especially when tracks like “Turn It Off” appear to oscillate between comfort and confrontation, embracing both in equal measure.
Of course, the very act of sampling and splicing embodies this paradox. One simply takes familiar elements and bends them to fit a unique artistic vision, leaving the core recognizable yet fundamentally altered. It’s a process of transformation, much like the way symbols and slogans can be co-opted and recontextualized, twisted into contradictions… akin to a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag absurdly displayed beside calls for government intervention and dictatorial fawning. That sense of political disarray seeps into Shorts as well, with tracks like “Makes My Blood Boil” and “What Can You Do?” simmering in a surreal, seething indictment of the hypocrisy that governs the world. But while that underlying malaise is inescapable in modern art and interpretation, it doesn’t overshadow the record’s other references, like the eerie, Lynchian nod to the otherworldly void of the Red Room in “Black Lodge.” Yet, what makes Shorts most compelling is how it lures the listener in with recognizable touchstones only to throw unexpected curveballs. When “I Like My Coffee Black” begins, there’s an anticipation of a computerized voice completing the phrase with some form of “as midnight on a moonless night,” a moment of aesthetic coherence ready to click into place. But KT, true to form, rarely offers resolutions in such a straightforward manner, keeping us not only guessing but also attuned to the unspoken depths beneath the sound.
Still, these are interpretations drawn from an artist who has deliberately withheld such clarity in their work. So how should we approach Shorts? Individually, tracks like “The Transformation To Metal Begins” offer a churning catharsis through layered dissonance, while “Experimental Computer Made Movie” pulses with a frenetic, looping rhythm that feels both chaotic and liberating. “Putting Gulf Breeze On The Map” delivers a musical laugh with its pseudo-serious take on alien documentation, a theme that resurfaces two tracks later in the closing number, “Laughing All The Way,” where a warped rendition of “Jingle Bells” collides with a hard-hitting hip-hop beat, turning holiday cheer into something surreal and subversive.
And subversion is ultimately the key to KT’s music, on Shorts and throughout their tangled catalog. It lies at that paradoxical heart of sampling and splicing–transforming familiarity into estrangement, turning what was once comforting into something uncanny, and reshaping confrontation into something unexpectedly inviting. Searching for deeper meaning will only elicit laughter from its creator, and perhaps from yourself if you linger too long, caught in a gaze that leads to mania. The absence of deeper meaning is, after all, the deeper meaning. That’s the puzzle, as it were. But it’s one that listeners can still find joy in with KT records, rearranging the pieces into something resembling an answer within their own minds. You never quite solve it, but with each new release, you get closer to a more coherent understanding, just as with Shorts, as jarring a KT collection as there ever was, yet brimming with sonic intrigue that keeps the momentum going for another decade’s worth of mystery.
Shorts is set for release on Tuesday, April 1 via Cherub Records, which you can stream and purchase via Bandcamp. For more updates on Kids Techno, follow them on social media.
