Artist Sevi Iko Dømochevsky visualises the kind of catastrophe that KMRU and Aho Ssan make audible in their Fact Mix, one that is painful to comprehend, yet serves as a prescient diagnosis of our present.
Kenyan sound artist Joseph Kamaru, otherwise known as KMRU, and Aho Ssan, the French producer and composer born Désiré Niamké, are two of of contemporary electronic music’s most fascinating and vital figures. While the former artist’s prolific experiments with field recording have seen him develop an approach to ambient composition that emerges from and through the listener’s relationship with the sounds of their physical environment, the latter artist uses the infamously byzantine programming language Max/MSP to delve deep into the infinite possibilities of synthetic sound. Across his catalogue, on records such as Peel, Jar and Imperceptible Perceptible, KMRU emphasises the importance of listening to what you might usually miss, using patchworks of field recordings, foley and processing to bring small details into sharp focus. In contrast, Aho Ssan operates in more speculative and expressionist space, on the one hand contorting synthesis in unexpected directions while with the other simulating sounds…
