press

Neil March | Trust the Doc | Edition 30, 16th July 2019

I have also previously reviewed Kassia Flux and again at Linear Obsessional (https://soundcloud.com/user-686518918) when she duetted live with Smallhaus as Fluxhaus and I also mentioned it in TTD when she was deservedly included in Late Junction’s artists of the year for 2018. So it was great to receive a new track from her which shows another side to her versatile multi-instrumental experimental music. And it was the particular style and sound of this track Quantum Deep that prompted me to include her music in this section where I have previously reviewed her under Contemporary Classical and Leftfield. It is further evidence of how blurred the borders between progressive musical territories are these days which is, of course, a good thing.

So to the track. Mystical voices float almost inaudibly above slow synth tremelo. The word ‘deeper’ continues to pop up above the wave of sounds before the beat vanishes and a minimal backdrop ensues. The structure is unusual, a series of changes in texture but all of them relatively transparent and adorned with semi-chanted voices. It works though and the somewhat sudden end leaves me wondering whether there is a part two in the making. Catch her stunning live set at Vanishing Point @ The Ivy House, Nunhead, Peckham, SE London on 7th November.

‘I Hear You’ reviews (Feb 2018):

TQ fanzine – Feb 2018

“I’ve just finished the first listen. It is without doubt a staggeringly perfect album, she deserves extremely wide and long reaching exposure – brilliant!’

‘Early days, but this debut from @KassiaFlux on the @Richard_Linear label has just become contender for album of the year. Inventive, innovative, imaginative, exploratory, mind meltingly beautiful. Go buy the thing!”

Sound Projector

http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2018/10/20/hail-who/

“Kassia Flux is another woman performer though not so concerned with remaining anonymous. At least we know she used to be part of Redzone, is based in London, contributed one track to this label’s compilation A View From A Hill in 2017, and is also a genetic scientist. I Hear You (LINEAR OBSESSIONAL RECORDINGS LOR103) appears to be her first solo record, and I find it’s slowly winning me over with its varied bag of beetles and small armies of chirping crickets, each track an index of how much experimentation Flux is prepared to delve into in pursuit of her highly personal aims. Maja Osojnik is for me one of the high benchmarks of a woman solo creator who has gone further and dared to be more vulnerable in print than many masculine experimenters, yet she remains marginal and misunderstood; Kassia Flux isn’t quite in Maja’s league, but she could get there by stronger cultivation of her craft, and through digging more deeply into the tunnels of painful honesty. With this record, I’m finding myself more distracted than moved by the surface techniques – quite a lot of echo, extended notes, distortion, layering…but at least it’s all in the service of some highly imaginative, and at times very opaque, sketches of the human psyche. I’m particularly fond of the voice in this context (instead of all the droning and glitching being produced by machines) and Kassia has a distinctive vocal contribution to make. She’s also keen on “wild manipulations”, as the press note calls it, which means I assume applying the reprocessing knobs and magic boxes in painterly fashion, thus warping all the sounds as far as she dare take them into the realms of unreality. This strategy pays off for the most part, because when the final track kicks in, we suddenly hear field recordings of “real life” – other people tramping up and down stairs or marching about in some interior conclave and yapping out to each other. After all the semi-surreal gloop that preceded this moment, it was for me like waking up from a strangely compelling dream.”

Paul Margree | blog and radio show We Need No Swords

described my music as “forlorn electronic desolation”