This is a taster of the forthcoming album by Kumo - Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) written, and produced by Kumo AKA Jono Podmore.

Over 15 years ago, while working on an album of music based on the dance rhythms of the time, my old friend Uli Gerlach asked if I'd ever thought of investigating earlier dance music, the Foxtrot, Charleston, and so on. The idea stayed with me and, as it has been for so many of us, the lockdowns provided a chance to finally research this music and apply the findings to my own work.

My first discovery was that the essence of this music is a far cry from the superficial glitziness of Strictly Ballroom or the geriatric end-of-pier dancehall. The truth is that these are all slave dances. They all derive from African American culture of the late 19th and early 20th century and carry with them the trauma of slavery and treasured remnants of African culture. 
 
The work culminated in  Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) and an accompanying full-color zine available here:

http://www.psychomat.com/slave-dances-seven-portraits-zine

"Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) is an immensely pleasurable, brilliantly sourced weave of rhythm, texture and repurposed, reworked sounds doctored up in his
South London home studio. It is, however, a vital tool for reflection on the
connective history of Black music, remaking connections which have been erased by the habitual omission by whites of black agency in music history and its origins.

There is the sensibility of the gallery of these pieces; one could imagine them as hanging sculptures, or mixed media works incorporating diverse visual elements and materials. However, there is none of the gallery’s white-walled, silent sterility about Slave Dances (Seven Portraits), which is bristling and teeming, kinetic, and, despite the sombre subject matter, joyful, playful even. Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) is as delightful as it is educational."

David Stubbs

Slave Dances

Slave Dances (Seven Portraits) Taster

sound~space emanates from a world seemingly on the edge of collapse, where empathy is all but extinct, language has failed, interaction reduced to ‘diss’ and ‘cuss.’ Using discarded frequencies, a sonic resistance creates militant meditations designed for spirit renewal, punctuated with pulses to facilitate bodily propulsion. Tonal analysis reveals tools required for struggle, both internal and external. 
Though you sometimes walk like living ghosts, mourning the future, know that beauty exists in places you wouldn’t dare to look