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KRM & KMRU, “Disconnect” (Phantom Limb, 2024)

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This collaboration between Kenyan soundscape auteur Joseph Kamaru and industrial dub heavyweight Kevin Martin came as quite a wonderful surprise, as their seemingly unlikely pairing turned out to be a match made in heaven. The unexpected twists do not end there, however, as Martin also persuaded Kamaru to contribute some singing and spoken word passages after being captivated by his lilting voice and “soft-spoken accent.” The warmth and humanizing effect of that innovation beautifully elevates Disconnect into something far more compelling than just the collision of two different visions. The dub-inspired format of this release is yet another delightful curveball, as Disconnect has the feel of a maxi-single rather than an album, with the epic “Differences” acting as the killer single that is backed by a darker B-side (“Arkives”) and two radically transformed variations of each. The entire release is excellent, but “Differences” in particular stands as one of the strongest pieces in either artist’s already revered oeuvre.

The opening “Differences” slowly fades into being with deep bass drones and a slow, simple two-note melody with a long and reverberant decay. Gradually, however, a chant-like vocal loop emerges and the piece slowly blossoms into a rich tapestry of gorgeously textured layers that feels like a sublime and beatless deconstruction of a great Jesu song. It is a perfect marriage of melody and production, as Kamaru’s vocal hook is bittersweet and soulful, the psychedelic touches are immersive and spatially mobile, and every note is given plenty of space to linger and be felt. In short, “Differences” is thirteen minutes of pure sonic heaven. Needless to say, that sets the bar quite high for the rest of the album, but revisiting the same raw material two more times is an inventive way to solve such a problem. On the colder “Difference,” a slow but insistent kick drum thump carves a path through bleary underground parking garage ambiance, while “Differ” sounds like a spectral, time-stretched, and hiss-soaked deconstruction of Basic Channel-style dub techno.

The album’s other major piece is the considerably darker “Arkives,” which initially has the feel of a dark ambient elegy but gradually intensifies into a roaring howl of anguish. The central thread that holds it all together is a poetic spoken word passage from Kamaru, which continually drifts in and out, pans around spatially, and undergoes hiss-soaked and echoing textural transformations. For that reason, it makes for haunting and immersive headphone listening, but I actually prefer the two shorter variations due to their more rhythmic nature. On “Ark,” the underlying drones of “Arkives” are chopped into buzzing throbs of distortion and gnawed by pulsing washes of white noise, while fragments of Kamaru’s spoken word passages drift in and out of focus. Elsewhere, the killer “Arcs” revisits that buzzing pulse, but it feels a lot more spacious and open this time around and the focus shifts far more to the hissing and crackling textures. To my ears, it evokes downed power lines crackling and sparking in the desolate, snowblown aftermath of an intense blizzard.

As far as individual pieces go, the highlights for me are “Differences” and “Arcs,” but I am even more impressed with how this album works as a whole. For example, the brilliant opening piece drew me completely into the album, which put me into the ideal mindset for appreciating the beautifully textured, spacious, and shapeshifting nature of Martin’s dubwise production magic. I also loved how each piece appeared in three radically different forms. In lesser hands, that would suggest a dearth of ideas or a release bloated with filler, but the transformations are quite inspired here and I was legitimately fascinated by how the same simple components could be reshaped into pieces with very different atmospheres and emotional shadings. In fact, it reminded me a lot of how memories degrade, transform, and dissolve over time, which may very well be by design given the content of Kamaru’s spoken word passages. In fact, I suspect that I still do not grasp the full conceptual depth of this album, but all of that is mere icing on the cake, as Disconnect is already a lock for one of the year’s finest headphone albums.

Listen here.

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A Lily, “Saru l​-​Qamar” (Phantom Limb, 2024)

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My familiarity with James Vella is primarily through his role running the excellent Phantom Limb label, but that is just one facet of a varied career, as he is also a fiction writer and a member of the Canterbury-based post-rock ensemble Yndi Halda. He records as a solo artist too and has been sporadically releasing albums as A Lily for almost two decades now. Notably, Vella is also of Maltese descent, which inspired this wonderful stylistic detour: Saru l-Qamar is assembled from tapes of home recordings archived by the Maltese heritage organization Magna Żmien. Naturally, that made my ears perk up immediately, as I often enjoy the crackling and hissing escapism of dispatches from long-dead people in far-flung places, but the “oneiric bliss” of Vella’s achingly beautiful and hallucinatory collages proved to be an unexpected and welcome enhancement. This is one of my favorite albums of the year thus far.

The album’s title translates as “They Became The Moon,” which is a lovely and poetic way of saying that the lives and loves of previous generations remain part of the fabric of our lives forever (like the moon, they are “always present, but always out of reach”). Naturally, Vella’s own family surfaces (in the cover art), but the bulk of these recordings are snatches of traditional Maltese folk songs known as għana. Normally, the phrase “folk song” conveys a canon of specific songs and lyrics that have existed for generations, but għana departs from that tradition in being a malleable song form that people can use to tell their own stories. According to Vella, “from the ‘60s until the modern era, it was common for Maltese families to receive reel tapes from relatives abroad,” as that was simply how people shared news with distant friends and family. In short, Maltese people had their own cassette underground in which they regularly exchanged personalized songs with each other. Unsurprisingly, I am now retroactively mad that my own family never exchanged songs about mundane events like getting a new cat or whatever. Life could be so much more beautiful than it currently is.

Notably, the history of għana is a fascinating rabbit hole of its own, as it apparently originated as a way for Maltese women to share news and gossip as they engaged in household chores on rooftops or communal wash houses carved out of caves. One of għana’s variants in particular is Għana tal-Fatt, which is a “melancholic ballad style” that translates as “fact” and was used to share interesting or humorous stories, local news, or colorful anecdotes about the various characters in their lives. This facet alone makes me dearly wish that I spoke Maltese, as the few translations that Vella provides reveal unexpected context and meaning to these pieces (“there was a burglar in the house yesterday” being a personal favorite, though “do your utmost to spend all your money at the feast” is a close second).

The compositions themselves are simple and effective, as almost every piece is built from little more than melancholy Middle Eastern-sounding vocal loops over a synthesizer backdrop. While Vella notes that there was “minimal DAW intervention,” the vocal loops are enhanced by “a lot of audio cleaning” as well as some effects. The opening “Żeżina Ddoqq is-Sħab (Zezina Plays the Clouds)” provides a fine introduction to the album’s aesthetic, as a frayed snatches of a beautiful and sad vocal melody fitfully erupt from a muted backdrop of woozy and flicking synth shimmer. Vella subtly fleshes out the music a bit more as the piece unfolds, but the vocal sample remains the focus and gradually transforms through added harmonies and wah-wah. It feels melancholy, dreamlike, and ecstatic all at the same time and resembles some kind of space music séance with a digitized ghost, which is quite an excellent stylistic niche in my book.

The rest of the album could reasonably be described as variations on those same themes, but Vella manages to imbue each piece with its own distinct character despite his minimal palette. For example, the following “Kemm Nixtieq Li Qed (How I Wish I Was)” delves into even more hypnagogic territory, as the vocals are more submerged and the synths feel more slippery, shimmering, and viscous. Elsewhere, “Flimkien Ngħaddu Mill-Bieb (Together We Pass Through The Door)” feels almost like an autotuned outsider soul deconstruction, while “Ħajti Kollha, Qalbi (All My Life, My Heart)” feels like psychotropic drone music in flickering suspended animation. That said, I could probably write an entire paragraph about every single song on the album, as damn near every single piece features either a wonderfully haunting loop, a great spacy synth motif, or some kind of hissing and immersive textural fantasia.

In fact, it is entirely possible that the textures unexpectedly steal the show on this album, which was presumably no accident. Based on 2017’s Ten Drones on Cassette project (“each cassette is limited to one copy, and each cassette has a different piece taking up a complete 45 minute side”), it seems safe to say that Vella is a big fan of both physical media and cassette culture in general. As I am also a longtime fan of cassette culture, it was a legitimate delight to discover that Vella enlisted Sean McCann for the album’s mastering. I bring that up precisely because there was a brief stretch during the 2007-2012 underground cassette explosion in which it seemed like damn near every great new tape I discovered ubiquitously featured some kind of mastering/production credit for Sean McCann. For me, McCann’s mixing sorcery practically defined an era. While Saru l-Qamar was released on vinyl rather than cassette, Vella and McCann beautifully manage to recapture the same murky, hissing, and tactile magic of that brief drone/psych golden age. This album is absolutely mesmerizing (especially on headphones).

Listen here.