- The Kenyan artist plays with the very fabric of sound itself on his new record of powerful, sometimes serrated ambient and drone music.
- KMRU's specialty is subtlety. His intense but slowly shifting tracks have always been focused on field recordings gathered around his home in Nairobi and his worldwide travels as a touring performer. For Dissolution Grip, he inverted his process. Instead of manipulating the samples themselves, he examined their waveforms and wrote synthesizer scores around those shapes. Rather than being audible, the field recordings are a ghostly container for a more ambitious and impressionistic way of making music.
On the title track, you can guess at what the samples might have been: voices, gulls, the soft swish of fabric. But KMRU has manipulated them to teeter between synths and instruments, pulling off an aural trick akin to the Yanny or Laurel meme, where generated tones almost transform into violins, oboes and French horns. But if you listen harder, they still sound like synths. A-side "Till Hurricane Bisect" starts off warm and gentle, like many of KMRU's previous recordings, but slowly introduces a smoothed-out distortion that wavers between a shoegazey wall of sound and oceanic lapping. An extended synth tone comes to the fore, then builds back into intense distortion: glass scraping across metal, a chopper blade or maybe a prepared piano.
This texture keeps KMRU's enveloping compositions from lapsing into the sappy warmth that has infected ambient since its New Age period. His sound reaches farther back, to La Monte Young's vast and uneasy soundscapes, the seeds of the genre. KMRU likes it louder, though, and his layering of instrumentation that cyclically builds and collapses on itself evokes Young's maximalist-minimalist contemporaries like Terry Riley and Steve Reich. In doing so he carves a third path between the two approaches, building meticulous cacophony but stretching it out so long that it becomes both loud and quiet at the same time, the sounds themselves both smoothed together and totally distinct. Like his sonic ancestors, KMRU is evolving not just his own sound, but ambient music itself.
Tracklist01. Till Hurricane Bisect
02. Dissolution Grip