Facsimile by Daniel Klag

Facsimile marks the second album by Daniel Klag for Soap Library and the tenth album to date for the New York-based artist.

An ode to portable literature — the Duchampian ideal of brevity, unseriousness, and mysteriousness popularized in Enrique Vila-Matas’ A Brief History of Portable Literature (1985) — Facsimile searches for melody amongst the everyday. Recorded over the course of two years in small, intimate spaces — hotel rooms, train cars, a cozy Manhattan apartment — Facsimile is an audio diary for the digital age, composed on a laptop using portable instruments such as battery-powered synths and samplers interspersed with field recordings sourced from East Coast hiking trips spanning Acadia to Asheville. Nature and artifice blend in equal, eerie measure. Album opener “False Start” finds birds chirping amongst the bleeps and bloops of a synthesizer, while “Colloquial Mode” and “Bliss Control” balance the gentle pitter-patter of a furry companion set against melancholic chords. Klag’s longtime inspirations — Cluster and Harmonia, guided by the ever-present Eno — leave their kosmische mark.

Literary heads may recognize similarities to Georges Perec’s pint-sized classic An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1982), in which the author spent three days recording everything that passed through his field of vision in Place Saint-Sulpice. Like Perec, Klag delights in the “infra ordinary” — the markings and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention. Facsimile embraces the static and fuzz of these in-between moments, demonstrating that there is strength in smallness and that our existence is, at its core, simply rhythm.

Daniel Klag is a solo musician residing in New York City. His output spans multiple labels including Muzan Editions, Patient Sounds, Constellation Tatsu, AMDISCS, and Soap Library. Known for dense and syrupy compositions, Klag’s signature sounds are constructed using isolated samples of acoustic and electric instruments, digitally abstracted and stretched in time.

Facsimile releases on Friday, October 4, 2024 in cassette and digital formats via Soap Library. A hand-embossed notebook measuring just slightly larger than the tape itself accompanies each cassette — a nod to smallness in paperback form.

purveyor of obsolete media

danielklag.com