K-Group

K-Group is a project of Paul Toohey from Surface Of The Earth. On this, his first solo album, the sound isn’t a million miles away from the host outfit – charred, chiselled blocks of sound, moved around at near-glacial pace – but there’s a little more activity here; using guitar, recording to cassette, he develops drone pieces that hang in the air, like abstract cloud formations, sometimes grey and foreboding, other times orange-red and livid. What constantly surprises about K-Group is the album’s depth of field. For an album that’s basically built around one guitar and an incredibly simple idea – what can this instrument do when it’s making noise in slow motion – it’s a rich, ofttimes radiant collection of material. Toohey is also smart to break it up into shorter pieces, as though, somehow, K-Group is a pop album – it’s just been submerged in twenty layers of mud, tar and fossil.