Recorded during a heatwave in a deconsecrated chapel and composed over a slow and sporadic process, Kepla’s new album In Furnace captures the uncanny feeling of living at the end of the world. Through drawing us into a place of stifling heat against the coolness of stone, with a broken church organ among Jon Davies’ multi-instrumental approach, it reflects on places that have been lost and gathered new meaning.
In July 2021, Jon arranged a weeklong residency at Capel-y-Graig, a chapel-turned-artspace in the Welsh hamlet of Furnace. He went there to experiment with field recordings, experiment with cello and piano, and learn the suona, a traditional double-reeded musical instrument made popular in China, as well as to gather recordings ready for resampling.
Following the residency it became evident that instead of reprocessing recordings, preserving the unique reverberation of the chapel, its surroundings and the extreme climate would become the album’s focal point. These contested objects - a chapel that no longer functions for organised religion; an instrument unmoored from its ritual function - exist during a time where ecological collapse is no longer in the distant future.
The conception of In Furnace began by obtaining and learning to play the suona soon after seeing Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1989 film A City of Sadness, the first major film to depict the February 28 incident in Taiwan, a 1947 anti-government uprising that was brutally suppressed.
After a recent family trip to Taipei, Jon felt a cultural estrangement from his Hong Kong/Taiwanese heritage, where political suppression is once again a rising concern. The suona represents a key ceremonial function across the Asian diaspora, although they have been recently banned from funeral rites in rural areas of China due to apparent public disruption.
The production of In Furnace marks a personal departure from Kepla’s debut album Within The Gaze, A Shadhavar, embracing musicality through performance and exploring complex harmony. From the opening of the record’s microtonal melody and spectral frequencies, to the album’s closing piece ‘Sanctifier,’ a one-take improvisation based on one of Olivier Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition, the underlying suspense throughout the record is maintained by its tonal ambiguity. Built on the organ’s wheezing and breathy chord cycles, ‘Time In Furnace’ gives the album its tensest moment, underpinned by a forebodingly glacial suona counterpoint.
Another inspiration for In Furnace is the filmic sculpting of time and subjectivity, in particular juxtaposing ‘real’ with ‘imagined’ spaces, alluding to a sense of storytelling. ‘Horse Ladder’ is the clearest example, setting the scene of Jon practising cello in the chapel against the distant crackles outside; the piece concludes with dramatic percussion accompanied by creeping strings (featuring Simon Barr from anarchist black metal group Dawn Ray’d) in a totally different sonic environment. Similarly, ‘A Clearing, Spectre In Autumn’ transports the listener from meditative drones to a brittle hum punctuated by synthetic feedback, both atmospheres reciprocating unease to each other.
“I’m trying to give some sort of sensitivity to a lot of stories that I’m tangentially related to, but I feel alienated from them. As an artist with both Chinese and Welsh backgrounds, but having grown up in South London, these cultures are currently estranged,” Jon says. “The suona is (hopefully) an instrument not just for playing music but as an activated artefact to reacquainting myself to something lost. Similarly, the Capel is a space that demands to be activated by sound, with its incredible acoustics, as well as the organ with only one fully functioning lung.” In Furnace pulls the ever more common feelings of cultural and ecological disintegration together into a haunting, textural elegy.
About Kepla:
Jon Davies is a musician based in Liverpool, born in Hong Kong, and has been making music since 2016 under the Kepla moniker. His work incorporates sound design, synthesis and improvisation grounded in free and modernist music, as well as drawing inspiration across artistic disciplines through collaborative practice.
Previous records can be found on Alien Jams, Purple Tape Pedigree, Entr’acte and Pale Master; In Furnace is his first release for Chinabot.
credits
released September 29, 2023
Music: Jon Davies
Cello, Ocarina, Organ, Percussion, Piano, Suona, Synthesis and Field Recordings: Jon Davies
Violin on Horse Ladder: Simon Barr
Additional mixing: Jacob King
Master: Justin Randel
Artwork: Saphy Vong
Photography: Jon Davies (Tainan, Taiwan) & Laura Harris (Furnace, Wales)
A gorgeous release from start to finish. It connected me to far away places in the spring, kept me cool in the summer, helped me embrace the change in the fall, and is keeping me warm in winter. I can't get enough of it. sad girl addict
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With all proceeds going to benefit Ukraine, the latest from Angela Winter is a beautifully haunting work that centers the human voice. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 16, 2022
