Anyone who falls into a pubescent giggle on hearing the project name Kot Kot chosen by singer and instrumentalist Lena Filatova will be surprised by the thrust of her album »I Pni«. The LP, which is released on the Belgian label Aguirre, sounds bitterly serious, completely without false bottom. Filatova croons her vocal parts as delicately as possible, oscillating between the vocal style of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons and the Scandinavian pop singer Sóley. The instrumental accompaniment is appropriately sparse, so as not to disturb the bright, fragile vocals too much. »I Pni« offers something alienating and disturbing in its perfect calm, beneath which a supernatural unpleasantness seems to bubble. This has not so much to do with the fragmentary hauntology character that the strangely recombined album exudes. Kot Kot seems to know exactly how intimidation works by psychological means. The best example is probably the central, longest track »Ottepel«, which shuffles across the attic in a nerve-racking, industrial five-four beat, while the artist stages herself as an otherworldly entity above it. This irritates in an eerie yet very successful way. The haunting is over again quickly and for this very reason does not become worn: none of the five tracks reaches the five-minute mark, some seem more like experimental interludes than fully fledged pieces. They all have one thing in common though: devotional, liturgical, keyboard instruments played to the point.
I Pni
