mouth music (afrotronica)

[via Nick Zurko]

release rationale:

Khalab has summoned a futuristic afro-centric soundscape by weaving a poly-phonic tapestry of future bass, jazz and field recordings. The LP’s title track tells hard truths from the mind of spoken word artist Tenesha The Wordsmith. Along with her words the LP’s title has been augmented with a date marking the arrival of an emancipated future. 

‘Black Noise 2084’ casts aside the worn and surface level cliché of black music being soul music. Khalab guides us to the beginning of a journey, the journey of rhythms and he takes us within earshot of the voices and spirits that carried them. Soul gained over aeons of terror and forced transportation, soul driving survival against systematic oppression, wholesale against a people. Khalab looks to the noise, the messages, the spirits, and evokes the light of ‘Black Noise 2084’ out of darkness.

From dystopian roots, the beat marabout Khalab has led his assembly of messengers to invoke this myth of cathartic liberation. ‘Black Noise 2084’ features the voices of musical voyagers seeking new pathways: Shabaka Hutchings, Moses Boyd, Tamar "The Collocutor" Osborn, the master Gabin Dabir, Tenesha The Wordsmith, Tommaso Cappellato, Prince Buju and Clap! Clap! Within the tapestry of Khalab’s ‘Black Noise 2084’ the myth moves through its cycle of life, initiations and ceremonies with a cast of unnamed messengers.

Khalab was invited to work with field recordings from the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa of Bruxelles. The museum’s recordings made for a post-colonial World, hold ethnographic and historical insights into the cultures of the region over the last 500 years. The Museum is far from the horrors that Belgian King, Leopold II unleashed during his colonial reign, however it is a dark legacy that is far from absolved.

‘Black Noise 2084’ opens a portal where displaced rhythms, chants, screams and dreams collide with quaking bass, a vortex of shattering synths, jazz rains and emotion all amalgamate. Empires for millennia thrived across the African continent and Empires are being willed to rise.

As Khalab draws the LP to a close he brings light with ‘Dawn’ ft Moses Boyd. A dawn firmly squared-up by its past, hard truths of a barbaric history embarking on the beginning of reconciliation. Drum beats usher in the arrival home for a new glory. 2084 a time when rhythms have shed the cargo of their haunted odyssey. The myth of ‘Black Noise 2084’ is a new dawn where the ghosts of Leopold and all his kind are finally excised. Atonement in hearing the truths carried across the ages, carried in noise, Black Noise. 

credits