KMRU & Aho Ssan – Resurgence

Peel and Jar, from Kenyan sound artist KMRU, and Simulacrum, from French electronic composer and producer Aho Ssan, were three of the most important electronic records from 2020, one of the more intense and challenging years in recent memory. KMRU’s tender field recordings and gauzy ambient compositions provided a much needed balm to quotidien anxiety, while Aho Ssan’s impossible jazz simulations and Max/MSP patchworks, released towards the beginning of the year, gathered urgent resonance as a prophetically incisive response to the mediated experience of living through a pandemic hunched over our smartphones and laptop screens. Though approaching sound from different directions, both artists emerged as vital new nodes within the tradition of Black radical music, combining virtuosic compositional talent with exploratory technological experimentation. Exploring each other’s practices over the course of years, in 2021 Berlin Atonal commissioned the pair to create a new composition for Metabolic Rift, which would