From KMRU & Aho Ssan's Limen LP

Vinyl & digital album: https://kmruahossan.bandcamp.com/album/limen

Released on April 29th, 2022

Last year, Kenyan sound artist Joseph Kamaru (aka KMRU) and French digital alchemist Niamké Désiré (aka Aho Ssan) were invited by Berlin Atonal to collaborate on a project for the festival's Metabolic Rift edition.

The duo had already been working together, but the offer provided the momentum to shift the conversation into another gear. Initially, they looked for thematic connections within their individual practices that might match Kamaru's meditative soundscapes with Désiré's crumbling cyberpunk expressionism, and surprisingly for two artists renowned for their grasp of minimalism, it was the opposite that drew their attention. Watching the world shift as it reacted to the spiraling pandemic, Kamaru and Désiré were moved to experiment with volume, physicality, and intense emotionality.

“I never made something so extreme," Désiré says of the duo's first recording, 2021's 'Ruined Abstractions', an extended composition that matches dense, powerful low-end drones with fractal digital fuzz and smokestack bruit. It set the mood for a back-and-forth that resulted in their seismic debut full-length, "Limen", described by the two acclaimed artists as an attempt to scrutinize the yin and yang of destruction and creation.

Cacophonous, concrete crunches fanfare the album's opening piece 'Resurgence' - the result of their Berlin Atonal commission - but the track refuses to languish in wrecking ball devastation. Instead, powerful synthesized harmonies ring from beneath the rubble, before stifling everything in a humid fuzz of dense, emotionally-charged cinematic electronics.

Influenced by the prescient post-apocalyptic mood of Katsuhiro Otomo's "Akira" and the mythological phoenix, an immortal bird said to be reborn from the ashes of its dying predecessor, "Limen" is an album that sonically snapshots the anxious, floral beauty of an explosion or the colorful intensity of a raging fire. It's rooted in concepts of duality - the idea something unsettling can be viewed from a different angle and re-interpreted.

On the album's epic, 21-minute centerpiece 'Ruined Abstraction I + II', swirling electromagnetic interference paints a haunted parallel vista that dissolves slowly into subtle, orchestral tones and booming, widescreen thuds.

Almost angelic closing track 'Rebirth' meanwhile is the most unashamedly beautiful composition Kamaru and Désiré have written together, but its choral bliss is doused in petroleum noise and saturated distortion.

"Limen" is an album that seeks to lift a veil of silence from the world, replacing it with maximalist bombast and vivid passion. It's a dynamic piece of work that finds its creators pushing themselves to the limits, deconstructing history as it detonates around us. 

All tracks written and produced by Joseph Kamaru
and Niamké Désiré; mastered by Joker

Published by Multiverse Media Publishing
© & ℗ Subtext / Multiverse LTD 2022

http://subtextrecordings.net/

Limen

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Rebirth

http://www.drunkmenworkhere.org/185.php?l=0

Jose Macabra, is an artist, sound designer, producer, video director, radio DJ/podcast maker and curator. 

Jose teaches Sound Arts and Music Production at the London College of Communications, UAL and other educational establishments. His work nourishes many influences, from the industrial and noise panoramas, together with a legion of related genres such as ritual and the darker flavours of techno, blended with sound art, soundscape, art brut and experimental music.
 
Jose has worked with and for Kimatica Studio, Persona Collective, Ernesto Tomasini, Ron Athey, HR. Giger, Sally Mann, J. Milo Taylor, Nicola Serra, Christian Duka, Martin Delaney, Eraldo Bernocchi, FFIN DANCE Company, Rum Luck Theatre Company, Persona Collective, UCL, UAL, SAE Institute, HMPPS Belmarsh and Unite the Union, to name a few.
 
Jose Macabra has performed in art establishment venues, including Barbican, Tate Modern, National Gallery X, Oxford University, Tate Liverpool, BFI, The Photographer's Gallery, Waterman's Centre, The Museum of Consciousness, Camberwell College of Arts, London College of Communication and Kent University. Works involving Jose's music and sound design have toured significant festivals in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, Hamburg, Athens, Brussels, Milan, Barcelona, Lisbon, Manchester, Liverpool and other cultural centres.
 
Jose's research interests include Electronic Music, Field Recording, Noise Music, Industrial Music, Improvisation, Sound Art, Performance Art, Queer Studies, Ritual Art Practice, Collaborative Practice, Altered States of Consciousness through Sound, Horror, Darkness, Film, Surrealism, Automatic Writing and  Spatial Audio.

Subtext Recordings is a Bristol founded / Berlin based label curated by james ginzburg.