An dynamite edit from Limen, the veryfirst collective job from Kenyan noise artist Joseph Kamaru and French electronic author and manufacturer Niamké Désiré.
Peel and Jar, from Kenyan noise artist KMRU, and Simulacrum, from French electronic author and manufacturer Aho Ssan, were 3 of the most essential electronic records from 2020, one of the more extreme and difficult years in current memory. KMRU’s tender field recordings and gauzy ambient structures supplied a much required balm to quotidien stressandanxiety, while Aho Ssan’s difficult jazz simulations and Max/MSP patchworks, launched towards the start of the year, collected immediate resonance as a prophetically incisive reaction to the moderated experience of living through a pandemic stooped over our smartdevices and laptopcomputer screens. Though approaching noise from various instructions, both artists emerged as essential brand-new nodes within the custom of Black extreme music, integrating virtuosic compositional skill with exploratory technological experimentation. Exploring each other’s practices over the course of years, in 2021 Berlin Atonal commissioned the set to produce a brand-new structure for Metabolic Rift, which would permit them to establish the individual reactions to a quickly altering world started on their solo records in a brand-new, collective instructions. The outcome was ‘Resurgence,’ a burning rumination on the post-apocalypse, motivated by Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, that sees the partners pressing each of their sounds well into the red.
Appearing above as a cinematic modify, ‘Resurgence’ sounds continuously on the edge of collapse, excavating a soundscape that discovers sharp meaning in distortion and entropy, echoing the styles of cosmic production through unrestrained damage that Akira revolves around. “I neverever made something so severe,” states Aho Ssan. Opening with melancholy drone threaded through textural complexity, the visceral problem capacity of the duo’s noise style recommends itself carefully inthepast appearing into metal pieces of searing feedback synthesis melting into radioactive bass, cranked as though desired to clean out the whole structure in its’ enormity. Receding temporarily, a coda kicks back in with spread percussive blasts and errant trap hi-hats, threatening at the last minute to cohere into a structure rattling rhythm. This development is mirrored in the modify’s visual, modified by Aho Ssan himself, which controls a volcanic landscape being allatonce formed and ruined by an eruption recorded in stroboscopic slow-motion. At once recommendation to and a departure from the harmful prospective attendedto in Akira, KMRU & Aho Ssan superimpose the hubris of mankind with the frustrating planetary power of tectonic activity, stimulated in the spacious bass tones that undergird ‘Resurgence’. Oscillating inbetween conceptual and technical dichotomies, the duo conjure a duality of viewpoint and tone, tempering both of their particular sounds in the molten product of their cooperation, in which extremity is alloyed with complexity.
This duality pervades the totality of Limen, the veryfirst collective task from KMRU and Aho Ssan. On Rebirth, which opens as a transcendent reprieve from the sweltered violence of Resurgence, develops in celestial atmosphere and gossamer information, priorto endingupbeing overwhelmed shredded feedback and overdriven waves of bass. Ruined Abstractions, the record’s greatest declaration, rises inbetween cacophony and special, digital density positioned in counterpoint with skyrocketing orchestral passages. In much the verysame method that Peel, Jar and Simulacrum felt like records completely of their time, Limen appears as both a effective alliance inbetween 2 of the most essential voices in modern speculative electronic music, as well as a prescient medicaldiagnosis of the precarious times we are living through, a soundtrack for browsing collapse.
‘Resurgence’ is taken from Limen, which is out now on Subtext Recordings. You can discover Aho Ssan on Instagram and Bandcamp. You can discover KMRU on Instagram and Ba