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Rising up in Nairobi, Kenya, Joseph Kamaru was accustomed to noise. Then, as a youngster, he moved outdoors the town, and the din eased; the sounds of visitors and souped-up matatus gave method to birdsong, and he started carrying a handheld recorder, studying to navigate the world along with his ears. His eureka second as a younger artist was discovering that he might channel the sounds of a rickety outdated passenger practice into looping rhythms; that was the start of the musical type that he has developed below his KMRU alias on recordings like his 2020 breakout album Peel, the place discipline recordings and synthesized sounds come collectively in a porous weave. A prolific producer, KMRU has continued to discover the usage of discipline recordings throughout a variety of largely self-released recordings, typically emphasizing tonal components and elsewhere pushing deeper into the swirl of discovered sounds; what has held fixed is his music’s meditative high quality.
The place stillness reigns in KMRU’s music, Niamké Désiré courts chaos. Higher often called Aho Ssan, the Parisian digital musician builds his personal digital devices within the visible programming language Max/MSP; no matter numbers are being crunched below the digital hood, his music typically appears like a snapshot of one thing being torn on the molecular stage. His debut album, 2020’s Simulacrum, remembers the church-on-fire drama of Ben Frost, however pay shut consideration to his swells of distortion and what at first seems to be a strong wall of sound disintegrates into waves of granular element, each bass hit a boulder crumbling to mud.
Even so, Désiré’s music will not be with out its extra contemplative register, so that you may assume {that a} assembly of the 2 musicians would entail discovering a midway level between their respective types. However after they sat down collectively, they shocked even themselves: “I by no means made one thing so excessive,” mentioned Désiré of their first recording. That includes three tracks composed and recorded on three separate events, Limen paperwork the duo’s ongoing dialogue.
“Resurgence,” primarily based on an set up they created for Berlin Atonal’s 2021 version, opens Limen with what feels like an orchestra tuning up in a burning theater, static crackling on the edges of thickening drones; it’s one way or the other harsh but lulling. Three and a half minutes in, the primary actual motif seems: a mournful lead melody someplace between a trumpet and a desk noticed that sounds extra dramatic and extra regal than something in both artist’s catalog. The bass rumbles volcanically; the sides of the soundscape are a sustained paroxysm of sharpening knives and sandblasting weapons. Roughly midway by the 12-minute piece, there’s a short decrescendo, just for the assault to renew with renewed power earlier than one thing much more shocking occurs: The quaking bass briefly smooths right into a syncopated sample harking back to techno. After which, the shards having momentarily assembled themselves into relative order, the entire thing dissipates, bowed strings and whispers of white noise dissolving again into nothingness.
