ALBUM // Baloji – Kaniama: Yellow Version
Post by Misha
The album is dead. People still continue to make them, sure, but the album as a holistic experience, as an event, increasingly feels like something of the past. Playlists on shuffle are the future. This reality has been closing in on us for a while now, probably it’s the fault of Napster and shortened attention spans, I dunno. And I’m not one to decry the new order simply because it’s *not how things used to be done*. I love a good playlist. Love listening to the same two singles from a new album over and over until they are branded into my brain’s synapses like a trauma memory. But sometimes I think about what we give up by refusing to meander through a project on the artist’s time. What secrets are we not hearing?
On the other hand, maybe the album isn’t dead. Maybe that’s melodramatic. Maybe the album is just in the process of being reborn. Tierra Whack’s Whack World is a new kind of album, for instance. Lemonade is a new kind of album. Kaniama is a new kind of album. This is the record’s second release -it came out last year as a traditional 14 track album, but Baloji insisted that it be rereleased this year the way he originally intended, as a single continuous track.
It’s a bold move to release a single track album, especially one clocking in at 78 minutes long. It’s sort of the inverse of the bite-sized Tierra Whack approach – 15 songs at 60 seconds apiece, each one a breadcrumb leading to the next, encouraging the listener forward through the dollhouse world she created. By contrast, Baloji’s world is a mountain range that has no paths, let alone breadcrumbs to follow.
But once you enter it’s tough not to want to explore. It’s tough not to wander around awestruck, slip into a languid river and watch the scenery shift and shimmer into newness at every turn. It’s hard to imagine listening to this perfectly fluid album any other way. The transitions are so precise. The world is so meticulously constructed that listening out of order becomes a jagged experience. The songs on their own are remarkable – at turns danceable and introspective – but together they transcend the sum of their parts.
I like to imagine this 78 minute track being added to Spotify playlists, or autoplaying after someone’s party mix finishes up, and being listened to and appreciated in its entirety, as it should be. There’s a tiny act of rebellion in there somewhere.
Buy Kaniama: The Yellow Version here via Bella Union.