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Kevin Kenkel’s second album Break All the Bones in Your Heart comprises elegiac compositions for synthesizer and sampler, filled with pathos, heady atmospheres of longing and loneliness, unanswered calls, and missed connections. The album’s eleven tracks evoke the familiar sense of alienation experienced when the desire for human contact is mediated by apps and AI chatbots. Yet, at the album’s farthest end, it soundtracks dawn breaking over a far-away city, and to borrow one of Kenkel’s track titles, offers the tentative promise of “a different way to live.”

Kenkel possesses the uncanny ability to give samples from TV news and movies an emotional charge. “Sleepwalker I” opens the album with a cacophonic spray of voices, akin to scanning across radio frequencies or distracted channel hopping. The voices are slowly drowned by rising sawtooth tones, quickly segueing into the dark and moody groove of “He Isn’t Thinking About You.” A brief minute of pulsing rhythm — its energy enervated, like an exhausted raver flagging on the dancefloor — collapses into an uneasy phone message, then the soft organ drone of “Sleepwalker II,” in which a man’s plaintive voice repeats a warning: don’t turn around.

Kenkel’s compositional style is marked by the lush and melodic synth arpeggios heard on the title track “Break All the Bones in Your Heart” and on “Imaginary Boyfriend (Elodie’s Haunted Memory Version).” Here, Grammy nominated pianist Adam Tendler transposes the dancing arpeggios into a haunting piano performance, which a rising tide of distortion threatens to consume. Kenkel and Tendler bring the sonic environment of the album into a bigger space, as if throwing open the window in order to air out the claustrophobic introspection of the earlier tracks — a turn outwards rather than inwards.

By the album’s sonic and emotional midpoint — “Please, don’t” featuring Holly Herndon's Holly+ AI voice generator — slow, plangent melody has given way to urgent, bubbling, clusters of notes, which fall back and disintegrate into indistinct field recording. In the hypnotic “Twin Engines,” a hovering choral drone holds the album in stillness, a kind of limbo. A clipped voice utters short, telegrammatic phrases: locked door, in the air, spinning around, in the dark. The title is the key: a long-distance night flight, the quiet rumble of jet engines, a narcotized state of mind, the moon eclipsed by the sun.

In the album closer “An Amazing Dream of Mt. Fuji,” light begins to shimmer across slow, unfurling modular rhythms, into which multi-instrumentalist (and fellow Soap Librarian) Eve Essex burns hot lines of overdriven flute and saxophone. The claustrophobic fog of the album’s first half evaporates. The sleepwalker wakes up to a new day, a new start. But anxiety lingers, as a sampled voice repeats oh no, not again — over and over, back to the beginning.

Kevin Kenkel is an artist and musician based in Brooklyn, originally from Los Angeles. His method of composition is inspired by aleatoric or chance methods, having studied the works of composers including John Cage, Henry Cowell, Brian Eno, Paul Lansky, Elodie Lauten, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Laurie Spiegel. The exploration and exploitation of developing technologies — especially chatbots and other AI-powered systems for communication — are of paramount interest in his work, complementing his use of analog synthesizers, analog mixers, outboard equipment, and tape recorders.

Break All the Bones in Your Heart releases on June 7, 2024 in digital and cassette tape formats via Soap Library. Each tape is accompanied by a vial of 99.99999% crystalline silicon shards sourced from Luciteria Science. As the main element in semiconductor electronics, including telephones, radios, and computers, silicon is the heart of modern day communication devices – now broken apart for your pleasure.

Break All The Bones in Your Heart

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Kevin Kenkel – Please, don't

Sometimes it’s the familiar things that get you. Microfibers, the self-titled debut release by visual artists and musical collaborators Jonny Campolo, Keegan Monaghan, and Eugene Wasserman, makes the everyday strange — conjuring up an intensity that belies its unassuming title, surfing the tension between the warmth of its communal effort and cool-to-the-touch presentation.

Microfibers is an otherworldly transmission from known territory. Recorded at Brooklyn’s totemic BC Studios — helmed by the same Martin Bisi who has presided over a host of avant classics in Gowanus since the 80s — the two-track album is mere degrees of separation from its influence. BC Studios was built with Brian Eno to make Ambient 4: On Land (1982), an out-there favorite at the heart of Microfibers’ inspirational cosmos. Its core and peripheral contributors are now standbys of the greater New York art and art-adjacent music scenes, drawing from a similar set of influences spanning film music, ambient, and free-improvisational styles.

Familiarities aside, there’s nothing quite like Microfibers. It bathes in the uncanny, a subtle and all-the-more destabilizing twist on the normal. As with its ambient and minimalist forebears, the album’s twin tracks consciously create a space rather than blending into the background — an oblique pushback to the anesthetizing playlist ambient that soundtracks our outer lives. While Microfibers can resemble soundtrack music in its patience, it is more filmic than a typical score would allow, with its own suggestive narrative and heady atmosphere. Tension and release, dissonance and consonance, and attack and sustain all shed their expected expressive functions. The mood is resolutely ambivalent, spaciously claustrophobic, serenely tense.

Clocking in at just over 18 minutes, “Glass of Water” creeps in on a hesitant harp arpeggio from Shelley Burgon, patiently unfolding alongside increasingly insistent background thrums and hits. The meditative quality of the Italian avant-garde is present, but the sense of repose is slightly askew, as Burgon’s microtonal plucks fold in gently alongside blocks of sonic shade and grit. Meanwhile, “Tiers” smolders with overdubbed saxophones courtesy of fellow Soap Librarian Eve Essex, splitting the difference between haunted overdubs and lockdown dread. As bell-like sounds — evocative of a forgotten herd on a far-off knoll — rise in the mix, metal-splinterings from a prepared piano jar the listener from their reverie.

The recording process laid the groundwork for its multivalent listening experience. Beginning as motifs drawn from long improvisations, the music slowly grew into a hybrid improv-composition, as the trio overlaid responses to their initial gestures using guitar, synth, and a range of other instruments to dialogue with themselves asynchronously. The result is a controlled, musical aleatoric, evoking the wistful feeling of a chance encounter; a fleeting conversation with a passerby that lingers in the memory. Despite its connection to the canon of experimental minimalism, the album as a whole conjures a contemporary feeling, one that is fraught with both tension and possibility. Microfibers contains a lot, but conceals as much as it reveals, inviting you to dwell in its liminality a little longer.

Microfibers releases on Friday, May 9, 2025 on Soap Library in vinyl LP, cassette, and digital formats, accompanied by a double-sided 20-strike matchbook. Jump in, the water’s warm – but so is the flame.

©2025 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

Microfibers

Microfibers — Glass of Water

Are more men in your life a good thing? Kevin Kenkel has some ideas. 

Over the past years, the Brooklyn composer has built up a body of work that unleashes a tangle of modular synthesizers to map out the networks we use to connect with each other — socially, sexually, sadly, hopefully. His self-released debut album, Will You Please Let Me Pour My Heart Out? (2021) reached out to the world like a cat bathing in the sun, aching for a rub. His second album, and first for Soap Library, Break All the Bones in Your Heart (2024), hosted guests such as Colin Self, Eve Essex, Adam Tendler — and a few ghostly samples — for a series of intimate encounters. What developed was a suite of songs that, like love itself, remain irresistible in their mystery. 

Break All the Bones in Your Heart standout “Imaginary Boyfriend (Elodie’s Haunted Memory Version)” now plays the field on Kenkel’s new EP, Imaginary Boyfriend: Versions, for which he commissioned a series of remixes — and added a few of his own. 

Originally a three-way between Tendler’s aching piano, waves of distortion, and a few words from the late microtonalist Elodie Lauten, “Imaginary Boyfriend: Piano Version” strips Tendler’s performance to bare bones, with only a bit of room tone, warm as blush. The result is handsome yet lonely — a lover with nimble fingers and stamina. “Imaginary Boyfriend: Original Version” mirrors Tendler’s solo performance with one of Kenkel’s own — an offering of the seminal composition for synth. Its slow and steady analog arpeggios keep time with the kickdrum’s gentle pound — a reminder that sometimes you’ve already got what you need. 

Maybe a duo would suit you better. “Imaginary Boyfriend: Beat Detectives Remix” brings in the venerable New York pair for a heavy dub session. Here, a rustling bed of filtered drums opens the door for Kenkel’s modular hooks, with curious vocal samples making for excellent pillowtalk. Ready for self-reflection? “Imaginary Boyfriend: Dub Version” takes its time exploring the original’s solid frame, probing the harmonics, flexing the rhythm to let the ventricles pump, creating a space for the song to shiver and contract, then relax and rise again. It’s not so much a reinvention as a generous linger — an invitation to stay just a little bit longer. On the other hand, “Imaginary Boyfriend: Arcade Mode” revels in playing games. If the original version seduced you with its soft languorous sounds, this one flirts with 8-bit toxins. Game over, but give it time — a bad date eventually becomes a good story. 

Perhaps though, this is all too intense, as simple affection is often the hardest to find. Open your eyes to “Imaginary Boyfriend: Tropical Version” — a warm suspension, sonically bathing in self-care, a moist furrow through which synth lines gradually glisten. The mix leaves long echoes like stains — afterglow made aural. In the end, what more could you want? 

If things get dark — and in matters of love and lust, they always do — then Imaginary Boyfriend has just the right tool. Imaginary Boyfriend: Versions is available via Soap Library on May 2, 2025 in digital and cassette tape formats; the physical version comes with a pocket-sized flashlight keychain. Snap it on your belt loop and thrust yourself into the shadows — you’ve got a reliable pathfinder to where, or to whom, you’re finally headed.

©2025 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Original)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend feat. Adam Tendler (Piano Version)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Arcade Mode)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Dub Version)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Beat Detectives Remix)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Tropical Version)

Buildings & Lights by Noa, Guy, Noa

Children’s Museum of the Arts unites children and artists to create and share ambitious works of art with their communities and the world.

Buildings & Lights by Noa, Guy, Noa

Children's Museum of the Arts

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