Danish house and techno artist Kölsch’s latest album, ITalkToWater, incorporates recordings by his late musician father, and explores the emotional weight of grief; a sonically dense masterclass by a multi-million-streamed artist at the height of his creative powers. We found out more about its conception
It’s something that, at some point in our lives, we all must sadly face. The death of a loved one – particularly a parent – can be a life-defining, emotionally crippling moment.
For Danish techno monolith Kölsch, the loss of his father, Patrick Reilly, some 20 years ago, still loomed large internally. On his latest record, I Talk To Water, Kölsch (aka, Rune Reilly Kølsch) took audio recordings of his father, a sometime musician and guitar player, and built new electronic arrangements around these starting points.
We caught up with Rune to learn more about this intriguing process, and just what motivated the making of his fifth, and most arresting, record to date.
“Well, from a broader point of view the album process started basically 20 years ago when my father passed away,” explains Rune. “He was a musician and songwriter but he never released any music. He worked with drug addicts for 25 years and decided that that was his way of life, but nevertheless he’d play his guitar pretty much every day. I was into more modern music and he’d often come crashing into my room and start playing his guitar over anything that was on my stereo – it was pretty annoying at the time but in retrospect, quite funny.”
Following Patrick’s death, Rune avoided listening to anything his father had recorded. “It was quite sore and sensitive for me. During COVID, I finally mustered up the courage to go through his work, and some of it was recorded on MiniDisc and was usable, but some of it was broken. I found a few beautiful pieces, three of which ended up on the album.”
Where it began
Wallowing in these old MiniDisc recordings became a comfort to Rune, and creatively inspired the thematic thrust of his fifth album. “Initially I was going to put together an EP that was just him,” Rune says. “I thought it was a nice idea to release his first recorded work 20 years after his death! At the same time, it became a bit silly – realistically nobody would have cared. It would have been a good story, but only for me. I decided to make it a sort of collaborative effort. I thought I could take his music into a different dimension and meld it with what I’d been working on for the last few decades.”
The making of I Talk To Water spanned the next few years. “It was a long process, I discarded at least 12 or 13 tracks in the process that were not good enough. I’d say it started to really get going around 2019 and then dipped during COVID. Then after that it took a while to get finished. All the tracks are pretty m
