Iceland's Gudmunder Vignir Karlsson claims that his alter ego, Kippi Kaninus, is the Latin for the muscle that makes your smile; an unsubstantiated statement that ought to be taken with a large dose of salt.
Karlsson also described himself in one interview as "hedonistic and humorous", but neither of these adjectives spring readily to mind when listening to this album.
It's fair to conclude , therefore, that Karlsson actually wants to remain something of an enigma. So you are faced with an artist who dresses like Willie Wonka yet whose music is serious and quirky rather than playful or amusing.
He has one other album to his name - 2002's Huggun on Kitchen Motors.
Happens Secretly itself was originally a limited release in 2005 but was rightly picked up by Brainlove Records as being worthy of wider distribution.
As an electronica artist who has connections with the top names of contemporary Icelandic music, his music should be right up my street. He has toured with Múm and Amiina and even (allegedly) been part of the backing chorus for both Sigur Ros and Bjork. But this solo album is disappointing in that it has an aimless quality which means it lacks a strong identity of its own.
On the opening track (The Comfort Of My Eyes) I kept expecting the glitchy punctuation and splintered child-like voice to branch out into something more expansive and luminous. Instead, the tune remains locked into a seven minute repetitive loop that ultimately leads nowhere.
On track 2 (Whyshouldtheyounghavefaith) there's an initial hint of Kid A style tension but any menace fades well before its 9 minute duration is up.
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On A Soft Living Thing, the words of the song's title are repeated psalm-like over a brushed drum beat and a church organ that sounds like its been subjected to the cut and paste treatment . Here again, the track seems too long even though it lasts only 6 minutes.
The vaguely spiritual flavour continues on This Note Is D where a piano loop makes way for a violin in search of a tune, before straying off into more churchy organ cut ups and hymnal approximations.
Fitter, Softer, Deader? blends the spiritual (more organ!) with a robotic, characterless voice, while the pops and bleeps of Yfisrkin juxtapose with snippets of music of a more devotional character that reminded me slightly of Qawwali music from Pakistan.
The album closes with the tribal rhythms of Refrain which sound like they may have origins in the Far-East and here, at least, the artist succeeds in generating an hypnotic tone that is more fully realised that the meandering tracks that precede it.
Taken as a whole, the subdued quality of what the artist known as Kippi Kaninus calls "evolutions of soft electronica" , has something in common with 'The Disintegration Loops' without ever approaching the profundity of William Basinski's haunted melancholia.
Happens Secretly is an interesting album, but it's one which ultimately promises far more than it delivers.
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