Inwolves Involves is the second full-length from Belgian artist Karen Willems, released on Consouling Sounds (catalog SOULCD 71), and it represents a clear, deliberate step forward from where she left off with Air + in 2014. Willems is a drummer and bandleader who has worked across a wide range of collaborative and experimental contexts, including Yuko, Zita Swoon Group, and Cycle with Dirk Serries. She is not an artist who repeats herself, and this record makes that plain.
What Inwolves Involves Brings to the Table
Where Air + carried its intensity just below the surface, this album lets it through. Built on drums, guitar, and synthesizers, with contributions from Jurgen De Blonde and Ward Dupan, the music draws a clear line back to the kosmische Musik of the 1970s while pulling just as hard toward contemporary analogue electronics and dynamic sound-painting. The result sits in its own space: ominous and electrifying at once, moving between surprising intimacy and semi-industrial chaos, between silence and momentum, between rhythm and pure texture. The transitions are not jarring. They are fluent, almost inevitable, which is what makes the record work as a whole rather than as a collection of parts.
The Album as a Continuous Statement
The suite-like structure of Involves is one of its defining qualities. Willems constructs the album with a cohesion and focus that keep the listener oriented even as the music shifts through cinematic vistas and more compressed, claustrophobic passages. The organic interweaving of ideas here, the way rhythm gives way to texture and back again, reflects a compositional intelligence that refuses to settle. This is music shaped by someone who understands how sound accumulates and releases, and who uses that understanding deliberately.
Format and Label Details
This is the CD edition on Consouling Sounds, the Ghent-based Belgian label with a consistent track record in experimental, post-rock, and heavy ambient releases. Catalog number SOULCD 71. Consouling keeps their physical releases tight and purposeful, and this one fits that pattern. For collectors working through the label’s catalog, or anyone tracking Willems’ output across her various projects, this is the physical edition to have. The CD format suits the album’s continuous, suite-like flow particularly well, letting the sequencing do exactly what Willems intended without the side-break interruption of vinyl. If you are drawn to kosmische-influenced experimental music that earns its weight and takes its time getting somewhere real, this record belongs in your collection.
