Artist Sevi Iko Dømochevsky visualises the kind of disaster that KMRU and Aho Ssan make audible in their Fact Mix, one that is agonizing to comprehend, yet serves as a prescient medicaldiagnosis of our present.
Kenyan noise artist Joseph Kamaru, otherwise understood as KMRU, and Aho Ssan, the French manufacturer and author born Désiré Niamké, are 2 of of modern electronic music’s most interesting and important figures. While the previous artist’s respected experiments with field recording haveactually seen him establish an method to ambient structure that emerges from and through the listener’s relationship with the sounds of their physical environment, the latter artist utilizes the infamously byzantine shows language Max/MSP to delve deep into the boundless possibilities of artificial noise. Across his brochure, on records such as Peel, Jar and Imperceptible Perceptible, KMRU stresses the significance of listening to what you may generally missouton, utilizing patchworks of field recordings, foley and processing to bring little information into sharp focus. In contrast, Aho Ssan runs in more speculative and expressionist area, on the one hand twisting synthesis in unforeseen instructions while with the other replicating sounds formerly unheard. On his 2020 album, Simulacrum, Niamké produced Max/MSP spots to mimic The Mensah Imaginary Band, a synthesised ensemble motivated by his grandpa Mensah Anthony, a trumpet gamer who in the ’50s led a Ghanaian band throughout the Ivory Coast and acted as a conductor at the nation’s famous Abissa Festival. Having neverever satisfied his grandpa, as well as neverever havingactually heard any recordings of his music, the artist developed The Mensah Imaginary Band as a indicates of linking with the music of his heritage, making sounds lost to memory product. Though maybe counterproductive, KMRU and Aho Ssan discover tremendous, crackling capacity energy in the contrast inbetween their approaches, welcoming mayhem and cacophony and for their impressive collective work, which hasactually seen both artists shunning the minimalism of previous solo tasks in favour of an intoxicating hybrid type of relentless digital maximalism.
“I neverever made something so severe,” Niamké states of his veryfirst recording with KMRU, a brooding structure made up of thick swarms of sound, groaning low-end and heart-wrenching synth improvisations, evidence incarnate that, in the right hands, ambient, far from drifting off in the background, has the intense power to swallowup whole spaces, volcanic eruptions of noise carried into a deeply resonant collective expression. Commissioned by Berlin Atonal for their Metabolic Rift occasion, that veryfirst recording would grow and establish to ultimately flower into Limen, the duo’s 2020 album for Subtext. Here, driven by the internal and external pressure of the pandemic, the partners checkedout the dichotomy of their collaboration additional, taking cyclical procedures of damage and production as a jumping off point to record an album structured around duality in sound, principle and execution. The result, in the words of Subtext creator James Ginzburg, unfolds as a soundtrack for “deconstructing history as it detonates around us.” It’s among the debris of this detonation that we discover ourselves for KMRU and Aho Ssan’s mostcurrent job, an audiovisual mix produced alongwith visual artist Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, who plunges us through the smog of a post-apocalypse, sliding through destroyed environments and environments like a truth warping ghost haunting a dead world. “The technique of the mix was rather smooth,” describes Kamaru. “It’s apparent how both of our works juxtapose onto each other and the mix feels like an antiphony inbetween our sonic worlds. I started the mix with subtle tones and tracks presently unreleased and Désiré did the exactsame with a more abrasive ending, an rotating reaction to the veryfirst half of the mix, which imbues an attunement to the truth through stillness, turmoil and regrowth in a dialog inbetween both of us.”
“I can’t appear to escape the concept that people are so blissfully oblivious of the truth of the world,” asserts Dømochevsky, framing KMRU and Aho Ssan’s armageddon ambient in movement blur and artificial haze, languidly moving inbetween a haunting series of disastrous circumstances. The bleached ribs of a decomposing leviathan protrude from a drainedpipes sea bed like spiny columns in a post-apocalyptic cathedral, its colossal spine cable stickingout from a carcass slick with sea water. Salt and whale blood swirl together in the discordant drones of unreleased product from KMRU, the sounds of a Berlin train serving as a peaceful tip of a world left to messup. Space Afrika’s ethereal spot of The Orielles ‘Beam/s’ strikes an spooky harshness versus a crimson sun setting over a radioactive sea, their haunting refrain, “something real, something genuine” distorted into a cooling portent of what at present feels like our world’s unavoidable environment collapse. Just as KMRU’s soundscapes drift inbetween dissociation and anxiousness, an amorphous smog thick with stress, Dømochevsky’s images appears captured inbetween entropy and waviness, spotted with analogue grain, the stunning mishaps of corrupt innovation. The exhausted attack of Aho Ssan & Josèfa Ntjam ‘Dislocations’ bleeding into an excerpt of ‘Ego Death,’ carriedout at the 2022 edition of Unsound by Niamké and Resina, signal