K. Leimer

Since the mid-1970s, Seattle-based composer K. Leimer has produced ambient and experimental music, issuing the bulk of it through Palace of Lights, the imprint he runs himself. Drawing from Brian Eno’s tape-loop experiments and the free-form cosmic explorations of Krautrock ensembles such as Cluster and Neu!, he generated comparable textures during an era when such approaches remained virtually unknown across the United States. His initial output encompassed ambient works including Closed System Potentials (1980) alongside more rhythmic efforts such as Land of Look Behind, composed as the soundtrack for a 1982 documentary examining Jamaica. Leimer also assembled Savant, an avant-funk/rock collective modeled on Material and the Golden Palominos. After an extended pause spanning nearly twenty years, he revived Palace of Lights near the start of the 2000s and resumed issuing material. By the mid-2010s, Leimer’s catalog began drawing greater attention than it had received in prior decades. RVNG Intl. presented A Period of Review, a survey of previously unreleased pieces, in 2014, while Leimer maintained a steady stream of albums such as 2015’s The Grey Catalog together with remastered editions of earlier recordings.

Kerry Leimer was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and grew up in Chicago before his family relocated to Seattle in 1967. As a teenager drawn to Dadaist and Surrealist art, he encountered experimental musicians whose work functioned as the sonic counterpart to abstract visual forms. He acquired inexpensive instruments and recording gear, then began exploring tape loops, textural sonorities, and unconventional studio methods. Leimer contributed to early cassettes issued by Anode (Robert Carlberg) from the mid-1970s onward, and his first releases appeared on Anode Productions toward the close of that decade. In 1979, Leimer and his wife, Dorothy Cross, founded Palace of Lights to support the expanding circle of experimental musicians then active in Seattle. His debut LP, Closed System Potentials, arrived in 1980. The follow-up, Land of Look Behind, served as the soundtrack to a 1982 documentary on Jamaican culture in the wake of Bob Marley’s death, merging ambient synthesizer layers with Nyabinghi drum patterns. During this period Leimer also pursued his Savant project, a collaborative studio endeavor that investigated funk, dub, and post-punk rhythms while relying heavily on sampling, an approach recalling Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Savant’s sole full-length, The Neo-Realist (At Risk), appeared in 1983.

After additional releases that same year, among them the tranquil Music for Land and Water and the more pulse-driven Imposed Order, Leimer withdrew from releasing music. He shifted from analog to digital instruments and kept recording privately, yet he did not reactivate Palace of Lights until 2002, at which point he reissued several earlier albums on CD alongside the newly recorded The Listening Room. Further Leimer full-lengths followed, among them 2004’s Statistical Truth and 2010’s Degraded Certainties, while Palace of Lights additionally documented artists including Gregory Taylor and Marc Barreca.

Around 2014 Leimer at last garnered substantial recognition when RVNG Intl. issued A Period of Review (Original Recordings: 1975-1983), a collection of previously unissued material. The same label released the Savant compilation Artificial Dance in 2015. Recordings 1977-1980, a double-LP reissue of selected early cassette works, appeared via Vinyl-on-Demand that year. Palace of Lights maintained a regular schedule of Leimer albums, among them 2015’s The Grey Catalog, 2016’s Re-enact, and multiple joint projects with Barreca. First Terrace Records presented Leimer’s 2017 collaboration with Like a Villain, and Origin Peoples issued the Kosmische-style Mitteltöner in 2018. Imposed Order/Imposed Absence, a remastered version of the 1983 album augmented by unreleased pieces from Leimer’s long hiatus, also surfaced in 2018. The dense, politically engaged Irrational Overcast came out on First Terrace in 2019.