KMRU, “Kin” (Editions Mego, 2026)
I had admittedly become a bit numb to this prolific Kenyan producer’s steady stream of ambient releases in the years since he first burst onto the scene with 2020’s Peel, but this second Editions Mego album is one hell of a stunner. Fittingly, Kin first began to take shape in 2021 when KMRU discussed his vision for Peel’s sequel with label head Peter Rehberg, but that particular vision was unsurprisingly put on ice with Rehberg’s untimely passing. After about a year, however, KMRU gradually returned to that material and a rather different and noisier vision began to take shape instead. Partially inspired by distorted guitar sounds of KMRU’s youth, the viscerally snarling and smoldering Kin sounds like one of his stronger ambient albums was doused with gas and set ablaze. Fittingly, that vision is reminiscent of some of the best bits of Pita’s Get Out and Rehberg’s former bandmate Christian Fennesz turns up to the party as well, which makes Kin feel like both KMRU’s finest album to date and an improbable late-period return to Editions Mego’s golden age.
The opening “With Trees Where We Can See” provides a fairly representative (if condensed) introduction to Kin’s pleasures, as a thick and viscous-sounding synth motif languorously loops while a crackling and sizzling veil of distortion steadily intensifies. While that is hardly groundbreaking territory in the “power ambient” realm, KMRU’s approach is a bit more layered and mysterious than most, as a whistling and howling melody gradually starts to emerge from the sea of noise. While that particular piece clocks in at a mere three minutes in length, the overall trend throughout the album is that the longer pieces tend to undergo the most magical and sublime transformations (though the 20-minute closer “By Absence” is a more improvisatory and bird song-enhanced exception to that rule).
Bookends aside, however, every single piece on Kin weaves absolutely mesmerizing and vibrantly smoldering beauty from a shifting balance of ambient bliss, noise squall, and submerged melody and KMRU intuitively allows them all exactly enough time to fully and organically blossom. Sometimes the difference between good music and great music comes down to unerring natural instincts regarding intangibles like patience, nuance, and pacing and KMRU consistently embodies that rare and elusive gift throughout much of Kin.
In short, all of Kin’s strongest pieces are essentially just a simple, focused, and uncluttered idea that gradually expands, intensifies, and becomes more harmonically and texturally rich. In the album’s centerpiece “Blurred,” for example, rhythmic waves of buzzing drones drift in and out of focus while Fennesz’s faded and shimmering guitars gently reverberate, but the coolest bit is how it all becomes a frequency-saturated epic that evokes a hallucinatory and increasingly violent shoegaze sea veiled in mist. Elsewhere, “They Are Here” feels like a noise-gnawed film score in which ritualistic vibes and gnarled dissonances gradually reveal a glassy, slow-motion melody that feels like a crystalline mirage seen through a wall of flames.
In the more spacious and murky “Maybe,” a breathy repeating flute tone conjures a supernaturally lingering haze of enchanted and undulating murk that suggests shifting and wind-blown sand dunes faintly illuminated by the first rays of sunrise. KMRU plays things a bit more straight in “We Are,” as a lush, dreampop-adjacent chord progression anchors a howling motif that resembles something between smeared and sculpture feedback and a totally blown-out and distorted harmonica reverie. Unsurprisingly, all sound particularly wonderful on headphones, as the singular beauty of Kin lies primarily in the way KMRU’s lush and meditative ambient dreamscapes gradually burn up or go feral while their melodic soul quietly emerges from the maelstrom. I sincerely hope that KMRU sticks with this direction, as this new snarl and bite genuinely feels like the stylistic evolution equivalent of a butterfly explosively tearing free from its chrysalis.
Listen here.
