There’s usually a fairly clear correlation for me between the duration of an album and the amount of listening required before i feel i’ve begun to make sense of it. Not quite so simple as ‘short albums = shorter time, long albums = longer’, though that’s perhaps basically true. But in the case of World of Shadow, the latest album by Ko T. C., that correlation has been rendered moot. It lasts barely 27 minutes, but i’ve been grappling with and ruminating over it for several months, and even now i’m hesitant to start verbally wading into it.
i’ve written about T. C.’s music previously, as part of my January 2024 series exploring freely-available music. It was clear at that stage that their unique, pseudo-pop aesthetic was equal parts blue-eyed sentiment and manic mischief, often feeling barely-controlled, not so much composed as pointed in the right direction and left to run amok.
World of Shadow feels fundamentally different. Perhaps the title says it all, but the whole nature of what the music is, what it’s doing, and above all what it’s expressing is complex and challenging. It still sounds unmistakably like Ko T. C. – nothing has changed in that respect – but to an extent that’s skin deep; what these 15 short tracks amount to is a lot more.
In a way, it’s as if T. C. has gone out their way to undermine the music’s emotional content. First things first: in referring to emotional content, that’s coming from the lyrics, which have been provided for the first three, and the last two tracks (it’s worth noting that, aside from the single ‘Spider Verse‘, T. C. has never previously provided lyrics); the rest, most of which contain words, are left to us to decipher [edit: following this article, the lyrics for all songs have now been added]. This is all the more interesting because, despite a certain stream-of-consciousness quality here and there, the lyrics nonetheless have weight, they emote, yet their relationship with the music around them is provocative to a degree that’s often deliberately self-defeating.
Put simply, one gets the impression that Ko T. C. is actively seeking to obfuscate, mask and otherwise undermine their own lyrics. i’m not going to probe too deeply into why, except to say that the aspects of vulnerability that come through suggest the possibility of defence, security, secrecy (of course, supplying some lyrics prevents actual secrecy), even though T. C.’s musical aesthetic suggests otherwise, that it could all just be an effulgence of unbridled zeal, or a game. i’m not so sure.
There are various ways by which T. C. challenges our lyrical grasp, the first of which is speed. Always syllabic, never a melisma anywhere, the eponymous opening track is one of the best demonstrations of this. T. C. flies through the lyrics lightning fast while the plinky accompaniment rushes alongside it. In less than a minute, all four stanzas are complete, and the rest of the track recedes and resurges, pounds and pulls back. It’s not merely dream-like but fever dream-like, in which occasionally sobering sentiments of mortality – “i cannot believe this is me / this need to cease to be” – find themselves caught up in a non-stop swirl of bright, gaudy technicolor. Through this interplay of playful and serious, semantic content and sensory overload, Ko T. C. keeps the words at a distance – despite the fact that, through this opening track at least, there’s a distinct sense that the music is flowing instinctively from the words themselves, cavorting outwards from T. C.’s typically angular melody. Words as both catalyst and casualty; it’s a bewildering tension, seeming pulling us in, only to, not exactly push us away, but discreetly keep us at a distance.
In ‘Life Left Behind’, set to a delirious pounding pulse, the words are distorted beyond recognition. It feels ostensibly anthemic – but it lacks an anthem, as if an AI had made the attempt, appropriately breaking down at the end. It’s a wonderfully bizarre miniature, and there are others, such as the 30 seconds of ‘Elevator City’, where fragmentary thoughts are weirdly (but sweetly) toyed with, or the 47 seconds of ‘Your Name’, punchy and upbeat, surging in its second half. Many of these tracks speak with the condensed intensity of haikus; it’s as if they require such a huge burst of energy that they can only be maintained for a very short period. (i found this to be mirrored in my own listening, where i ended up approaching the album one track at a time, pausing in between to catch my breath and parse what had just happened.)
Another significant means by which the lyrics are undermined on World of Shadow is through saturation. Those insanely colourful arrangements that typify T. C.’s work here take on an unsettling level of presence, to the point of overload. ‘Eyes in the Dark’ initially presents itself as an innocent, innocuous pop song, albeit one that keeps shifting its tone and nature. Yet as it continues, it starts to teeter at the brink of being swamped by the electronics. There’s that aforementioned possible overenthusiasm, a desire to pump the music full of light and decoration, yet equally it’s as if the “dark” referred to in the lyrics has been inverted here to be dazzlingly bright, a kind of ‘anti-dark’ through which we struggle to make out what’s being sung. This is echoed in a scepticism of perception in the lyrics: “it’s just floating in the air / manifesting as what’s not there / nothing’s true…”.
A similar effect happens in ‘Can’t Decide’. There’s the impression of music directly supporting the vocal line, yet the words are deeply embedded within its texture. And even more so in ‘The White Orb’, where a strange noise rhythm clarifies into what’s at first a clear melody and accompaniment. Yet before long the latter becomes granularised, literally abrading the lyrics, scouring the voice, making understanding difficult. The same thing takes longer to transpire in ‘Tiny Glimpse 2’, which at 3:43, is by far the longest track on the album. On the one hand, the oversaturation only kicks in during the closing 30 seconds or so, but even before then, there’s an uncanny impression that the vocal line has been applied to music already extant, challenging the words in another way. The ending again walks that line of sympathy-antipathy, the arrangement propelling the lyrics while systematically destroying them.
This recurring tension between voice and accompaniment manifests in ‘The Trickster’ as two different impulses. The vocals are gentle, with radiant chords, but within a glitchy, pushy context that wants to propel things. While the voice wins, it (mischievously?) indicates submission – “it’s never clear but we’re moving so fast” – triggering / yielding / inviting the track to fly along at top speed, firing on all cylinders. Twin attitudes also appear in ‘Lands End’ (which i discussed in my 2024 article), where there’s a constant interplay between punch and lyricism, grit and ethereality, oscillating between them with gleeful abandon.
A couple of the tracks operate quite differently, to remarkable effect. One is ‘Dust / Mist’, which is perhaps the ultimate articulation of secreted meaning. The entire track is presented backwards, thereby completely nullifying our ability to grasp both its musical and lyrical content. A quick reversal of the audio file reveals it to be akin to a rather sweet, lo-fi bedroom recording: vocals with rudimentary guitar, a basic synth countermelody, and plenty of tape hiss. Taken at face value – in reverse – it has a remote, ghostly, somewhat forlorn quality, yet the suggestion to turn it around, and thereby open it up, is unavoidable.
This seems significant. i wonder whether a part of this consistent obfuscation of content is an implied insistence that the listener do some actual work to get at the meaning. To put it another way, the nuggets of lyrical gold, so to speak, aren’t there to be easily discovered, we have to go mining for them. Which suggests the superficial qualities of the music – bright, playful, colourful, bouncy, excited – are in part a ruse to put off all but the most genuinely inquisitive.
Also outstanding is penultimate track ‘Garden’, which despite lasting a mere minute-and-a-half taps into (and perhaps pays homage to) the ornate soundworld of Frank Zappa’s late Synclavier work. The words speak of natural beauty and physical vulnerability in threatening proximity: “fibers / jagged corner hiding in the dust / we breathe it in the garden / microscopic in the lung … every small gust of wind could murder me”. There are no histrionics, no supercharged hyperactivity here, just a faux-orchestral soundworld bringing a weird, glossy veneer of artificiality that only makes those lyrics seem more troubling.
Final track ‘Slate Rock’ offers something simpler – or perhaps, by this stage, we’re simply used to the language. Its words, clearer than ever, offer interesting reflections on the oversaturation (“oh cleanliness of music”), the over-ramped tempos (“you’re always in a hurry / but where are you you going?”), the juxtaposition of ferocity and fragility (“there’s violence and there’s torture / a membrane’s hair can feel it”), and the obfuscation (“dark scribbled lines and hunger / you never could conceal it … these words are nothing but a curse … if you could see it you would know / what to do where to go”). It’s as if, at the last, Ko T. C. is directly communicating not with us, but with music itself. The result is part synthesis – again the juxtaposition of punchy threatening accents in the midst of intimate song – part open-ended neutrality, offering not closure but a final statement that reflects back on the album itself, after its hectic energy has died down: “i’m listening and waiting”.
Released in January on People’s Coalition of Tandy, World of Shadow is available on CD and download.
