Neu When the dust settles: Klangstof

When in the middle of making of a record, it’s tempting to ignore the extra stuff that goes alongside music. Artwork, titles, how to play songs live - these are often afterthoughts. With Amsterdam-based musician Klangstof, however, he had everything in place before the sound.

In Dutch, the band name translates into two parts; “Klang” meaning “Reverb” and “Stof” meaning “Dust”. As far as summaries go for Koen van de Wardt’s music, these two words do the job. Reverb-drenched, light as dust, spacious pop rules the roost on debut album ‘Close Eyes to Exit’, which came out earlier this year.

“I heard the word “Klangstof” and I thought it should sound like this,” Koen remembers. “Then the artwork came, and it felt to me like, ‘This is me’. I was almost inspired by my own name and artwork, which was really weird.” In some ways, it’s a similar process to how Stanley Donwood paints Radiohead artwork while listening in on their studio sessions, or how Frank Ocean put together a great big magazine while making ‘Blonde’.

Radiohead happen to be a big reference point for Klangstof. When Koen was fifteen, he moved from the Netherlands to Finland. Thrown in the deep end, “all of a sudden” he was “in this country where nobody speaks my language and I don’t have friends anymore.” ‘OK Computer’ was the only CD he had on him at the time, and it turned into “my best friend for a year,” he says. “I wouldn’t feel that lonely, or I’d at least hear the voice of something thinking the same things that I did. They were the only band who really helped me feel the way I felt.”