Vinyl & digital album: 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

subtextrecordings.net/

Limen

Vinyl & digital album

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Resurgence

Myuthafoo

Memory Leak

Ego Death

Egress III

YU0 is back in Trance. With two science fiction tracks and two tracks inspired by the Netflix November Monster Month. You gona like it!

Vecna

Daniell

A note from the artist:

While shaping these tracks, I began working more intentionally with modulation between scales and tonal shifts. Across all the tracks, there’s a constant presence of ambient pads; sometimes lush and warm, sometimes cold and hypnotic. That balance of atmosphere is the glue of the EP: a sense of spaciousness cut through by rhythm. Each track carries a certain harshness in tone, but it never overwhelms; instead, it shapes a restless yet cathartic energy. I wanted to create a dreamlike quality, almost like stepping into a rainforest on another planet.

Koppe - K-Series (Previews)

http://www.self-titledmag.com/2016/05/03/premieresecond-woman-100407jd7/

Second Woman - "100407jd7"

Stefan Fraunberger - Elegie
from the album "Quellgeister#3-Bussd" expected October 2019.

Composed, performed and produced by Stefan Fraunberger. 
Recorded in September 2016 except B3 and B4 in September 2018 in the fortified church of Bussd. Bellows pumped / interpreted by Johanna Magdalena Guggenberger except on track B3 and B4 by Nicolai Guta.
Mastered by Neel at Enisslab Studio, Rome
Cover Artwork by George Sowden - Designed by M-L-XL
Supported by SKE / Austro Mechana

doser034LP - Morphine Records 2019
All rights reserved to the respective owners.

Stefan Fraunberger's Quellgeister#3 Bussd is Recorded entirely on an abandoned church's organ in the village of Bussd, Romania, the album is the third installment of the series by Austrian artist and composer Stefan Fraunberger. His research on the influence of nature on culture touches on time, periphery, memory, and transience as evidenced in his Quellgeister research. The album is an archeological sonic research on the deteriorating Organ discovered in the saxon church in Transylvania.

Stefan Fraunberger - Elegie (doser034LP preview)

Corra Linn

A Fossil Begins To Bray

A Desire, Nameless

@perila track from self-release collection
"decision to longing"
https://perilazone.bandcamp.com/album/decision-to-longing
defrosting dark winter waters into spring brook
________

if you accept all sounding sounds atm
you are most likely to enjoy it

perila – can we just be real

Subtext Recordings is a Bristol founded / Berlin based label curated by James Ginzburg.