Mangrove Ecologies: Listening to land
Akin to a jam session or freeform garage band, the group conversation features a diversity of talents; musical and sonic scholarship is represented by Pratyay Raha and Joseph Kamaru — also known as KMRU — while spatial interests are covered by architectural designers Gabriela Carrillo and Carlos Facio Gaxiola, from the Mexican practice Colectivo C733. In this exchange, all parties discuss the specific majesty of mangroves.
ACL 2024 ~ Top Ten Drone
ACL 2024 ~ The Top 20 Albums of the Year
KMRU ~ Natur (Touch)
Recalling Maryanne Amacher’s claim that all cities have a key, on Natur the artist who records as KMRU responds to the sounds of place. Prompted by a move from one city to another, the album explores those qualities that soundtrack urban life in the 21st century. The sound of electricity, technology, electromagnetic frequencies begin almost immediately and extend throughout the over 50 minute run time of the album’s single composition. The result is a soundscape cum meditation on what we hear and what we don’t hear. The composition’s drone and haptic frequencies are occasionally interrupted by the occasional field recording of birds or a child, but those sounds are the exception. As we noted in our original review of the album, there are moments of beauty on the album, but the listener is primarily enveloped in the hypnotic swoon of the electronic soundscape, making those moments of interruption all the more remarkable. (Jennifer Smart)
KMRU ~ Natur (Touch)
Have I ever mentioned my horseshoe theory of German efficiency? I’ll let you fill in the details, but when Joseph Kamaru left Nairobi to study in Berlin, he was surprised at the silence that shrouds the supposed capitol of European nightlife, shocked also by the lack of contrast between day and night. Since breaking through with Peel (2020), KMRU has been prolific in his output, including solo records as well as collaborations with Aho Ssan, Echium, and Kevin Richard Martin. Earlier this year, KMRU extended his album Temporary Stored, which transformed materials from the sonic archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium, by inviting his contemporaries to respond to the historical archive. But Natur is a solo artistic statement, a composition that has been honed by years of live performance. The first half wades through digital noise, mildly abrasive and at times harsh.f Natur evolves as natural sounds begin to emerge from the haze, a thick synth drone pulsing slowly along. But this is no simple bifurcation, no dialectic that find resolution. Natur transforms the contrast KMRU perceived between Nairobi and Berlin into a more universal statement on how our perception of reality is shaped by our relationship with technology. (Joseph Sannicandro)
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THE TOP 25 PRODUCERS WHO DEFINED THE YEAR 2024
KMRU
When Brian Eno coined the term ‘ambient’, he described it as music that “must be as ignorable as it is interesting”. The work of Joseph Kamaru, AKA KMRU, might be the epitome of this. With his ear constantly attuned to the world around him, Kamaru takes field recordings of the everyday noises we might otherwise ignore, and distorts them into vibrantly textured, experimental soundscapes. Having received international acclaim for his 2020 album ‘Peel’, the sound artist has been consistently building on this practice, finding new ways to elevate the beauty of noise.
This year saw a string of releases from the Nairobi-born, Berlin-based composer, starting with ‘Disconnect’, a collaborative album with British producer Kevin Richard Martin (AKA The Bug). Featuring KMRU’s own vocals, the six-track record is as eerie as it is peaceful, its apocalyptic drone sounds paradoxically pulling you in. Next came ‘Natur’, a 52-minute arrangement, which the artist first started work on in 2022. This formed a live show that KMRU took on tour, tweaking and sculpting the piece as he travelled. "I became it," he says of the track. "I merged with it on a performance level." Released this year, the composition explores the ways in which different places have different soundscapes, and how these distinct sonic identities inform our own behaviours.
Among collaborative projects with the likes of Thea Soti and Aho Ssan, KMRU put out another solo LP in 2024. Perhaps his best piece of work this year, ‘Forge’ is an exquisite 10-track record that shapes his field recordings into fully formed melodies and rhythms, while retaining their inherent delicacy and minimalism.

The 10 Best Experimental Albums Of 2024

KMRU - Natur (Touch)
For this ominous-yet-animated suite of static, Berlin-via-Nairobi sound artist KMRU uses electromagnetic microphones to reflect the invisible signals of city life. This means steady hums are swarmed with high-frequency chirps, crackling prickles twitch nervously like the flitting off exposed wires and the supposed pulses of life come in and out of focus.
The Best Field Recordings of 2024

Though his work centers around field recording, the Kenyan artist Joseph Kamaru has always had the heart of a composer. His breakthrough album, 2020’s Peel, combined environmental sound with emotive electronic pieces, while last year’s Dissolution Grip re-synthesized waveforms taken from field recordings so that the originals haunted the album like memories. Natur, though, is pure field recording, though you might not know it by listening. Waves of electricity buzz and vibrate, building to crescendos and then crashing down again into staticky ambience. These sounds were gathered with electromagnetic microphones from the streets of Berlin. In KMRU’s native Nairobi, power lines and transformers buzz in the streets and mingle with conversation, birds, and insects. Upon moving to Germany, he noticed how Berlin buried its power grid, banished its wildlife, and cloistered its population into apartment blocks. Natur summons these constituent parts back into the open, making technology’s confrontation with nature explicit. Though the album’s overpowering electrical hum suggests tech may be dominant, a closer listen reveals that wildlife is always at the margins, making itself heard through the noise.

The Top 50 Albums of 2024
KMRU & Kevin Richard Martin
Disconnect
Nairobi-born sound artist KMRU is famed for his ambient sound designs, drone explorations and albums of manipulated field recordings, while Kevin Richard Martin (a.k.a. The Bug) – as you’ll be well aware of by now – is the creator of rugged, dystopian and noise-strafed dub, grime and dancehall. So, you’d expect nothing less than boundary-pushing, depth-charging sonics from this meeting of minds – and that’s exactly what Disconnect delivers. The album is a back-and-forth dialogue between the two, in which KMRU’s colonial stories and spoken-word passages about stolen African artifacts are chopped up, Steve Reich-style, and woven into slowly disintegrating, end-of-times soundscapes that put the emphasis squarely on dread. The heavy mood throughout is devastating, harking back to Martin’s often-overlooked ambient work with Earth.

Kevin Richard Martin and KMRU Release New EP,
|Otherness|
The three-track record was birthed during the same studio sessions that led to this year's collaborative album, Disconnect
Kevin Richard Martin, AKA The Bug, and KMRU have released a new collaborative EP, Otherness.
Spanning three tracks, the EP is made up of music that the two artists created during the recording sessions that birthed their joint record Disconnect, which Phantom Limb released earlier this year. You can listen to the full EP below. In a statement, KMRU said: “I think Otherness carries the whole weight and the complexities of Disconnect. It extends the album into spaces of the unknown while remaining opaque.”
Otherness is out now on Phantom Limb.

The Best Albums of 2024
Imagine a centuries-old transmission from a distant solar system delivering an apocalyptic account of a long-defunct world’s final days. It’s not tough to imagine that posthumous communiqué sounding something like Disconnect. Born of the mutual admiration between British electronic composer/producer Kevin Martin and Nairobi-born sound artist Joseph Kamaru, the album ostensibly operates like ambient music, but it’s far too commanding to simply slip into the background. Kamaru’s electronically massaged vocals—from wordless moans to spoken-word snippets—blend with subterranean drones in a eulogy for post-industrial ghosts.
Wire mix: KMRU
December 2024
To mark Nonclassical’s 20th anniversary, the Kenyan born musician KMRU creates an exclusive mix of experimental classical and electronic music for The Wire
Top 10 Albums Of The Year 2024


Disconnect brings the evocative and enchanting results you would expect from such a high calibre connection, an inspired link up from the Phantom Limb crew.
Especially for our Albums of the Year edition, we have an exclusive 3 track CD cut from the same Disconnect sessions
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forge
Out on Seil Records
LP+ Digital + Tape



1×LP, Limited Coloured - Silver VINYL - Order on Bleep
Since emerging with his first releases in 2017, Joseph Kamaru AKA KMRU has fast become a key figure in the world of ambient music and its ever shifting definitions. The gargantuan nocturnes of 2020’s Peel on Editions Mego practically catapulted the Nairobian field recorder and versatile producer into view, leading to a prolific stream of works and collaborations across a spectrum of labels. His latest album forge follows in the vein of previous releases for Seil Records, comparatively more pop minded and snapshot like in nature when contextualised in a discography of LP side length explorations and examinations. Yet, no matter the length, melody still percolates through these tracks, patiently dribbling over intertwining notes that liquefy into a sonorous river. The soft rattle of blurry glass tones enters on ‘opener’, with sounds from the outer world leaking in as momentary glitches blip, chirp, and whirr. Sounds like these are gently amplified, muted yet vibrant, thrumming and swooping across active landscapes in playful compositions. Swirling notes of alien birdsong puff and push throughout ‘cine’, joined by fountains of static spewing over long lazing drones. Field recordings and the distorted, fried mbira plucks on tracks like ‘over a placid river’ bring the more earthly tones back into focus, growing blissfully erratic as they plink onwards. As forge merges these sounds in a “blend of melody and noise, rhythm and drone”, it pursues a communion of oscillation, with howling stretches that subtly warp and glide in harmony, ending with the amphibian synths of ‘mago’ jumping in and out of the captivating, mercurial space that KMRU conjures with every effort he has released thus far.

The 100 Best Albums of the 2020s So Far

Temporary Stored II
by KMRU, Aho Ssan, Lamin Fofana, Nyokabi Kariũki and Jessica Ekomane, Bhavisha Panchia
out on 11 October - OFNOT


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The Best Music of 2024 So Far
A rolling list of our favorite albums of the year, updated somewhat frequently.


The Best Ambient Music on Bandcamp, August 2024
“Natur is meditative and sparse. But an inescapable current of anxiety dwells beneath the five movement, 52-minute piece—as if to serve as a faint reminder that even the most casual downtown train ride could somehow go awry on the whim of technology. Using static hums to ponder differences in life between continents, Natur emphasizes KMRU’s ability to make instrumental music that packs the punch of a well-considered essay.“


The Kenyan artist’s new release is a stunning portrait of the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises of his hometown. In its swelling electrical currents lies a thesis about the richness and drama of everyday sounds.

Boomkat:
KMRU
Natur
KMRU's most visceral and satisfying full-length, 'Natur' is a departure from his more pastoral, drone-based work, tweaking invisible electromagnetic squeals and rumbles into searing noisescapes and evocative orchestral moans. Seriously elevated gear, essential listening for anyone into Christina Kubisch, Fennesz or Kassel Jaeger.


A closer Listen
KMRU ~ Natur (Review)
“Natur offers the sound of the new nature: the aggregate of sounds humans now consider natural, no matter what their source. If the piece sounds lulling rather than unsettling, the damage may already be done.”...”KMRU creates a blended soundtrack of his own relocation.“

“This Idea of Dub as a Philosophy”: A Talk with KMRU and Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug)
A conversation centered around the duo’s debut collaborative release.


Kevin Richard Martin & Joseph Kamaru on exploring Otherness with their joint album Disconnect
“From the bleak and angst-ridden artwork, to the quiet power of spoken word and desolate beats, Disconnect is a succinct and arresting project delving into the complexities of being Othered. KRM and KMRU meditate on several conceptual themes in a way that both expand their own individual practices, while highlighting their shared sensibilities. Though they represent two different generations of electronic musicianship, they found unexpected beauty and nuance in the experimental and collaborative process of creating the record and riffing on the ways they’ve experienced Otherness. Over our three-way call, KRM laughs while explaining “I thought we made a beautiful album, and the first comment I saw online from someone was ‘This is a really heavy record!’”

Disconnect
Kevin Richard Martin / KMRU
The pair’s debut collaboration is an amorphous, droning flood that sounds like the advent of the end times. In its hopeless sound world lies a poignant condemnation of colonial violence.

First Floor #226 –
- KMRU’s music is often hailed for its delicate nature and relative quiet, but the Kenyan artist will soon be releasing something far less orderly into the world: Natur, a long-form composition that’s said to use “dense clouds of static and intimidating, dissonant drones” to “[uncloak] the commotion hidden by the digital era’s ambiguous stillness.” The complete piece will be issued by the Touch label on July 26, but an extended excerpt is available now.
From Coldplay to KMRU: who to see at Glastonbury 2024
“ ....and the marrow-jolting ambience of Kenya’s KMRU (00.00, Friday, both Tree stage). BBT“

KRM & KMRU
Disconnect
The Bug and Joseph Kamaru find common ground and companionship in a stifling world on their album-length collaboration, writes Skye Butchard
"”What’s most impressive is how it merges its two creators. They’ve made a piece that combines their worlds so seamlessly. In doing so, they communicate how it feels to be alone but also what can be made together”
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CLASH MAGAZINE
KRM / The Bug & KMRU -Disconnect
A titanic experience...
“At times it feels like Martin and Kamaru aren’t just making new music but they’re trying to invent a new musical language. Miss at your peril”

The Wire 485
July 2024
KMRU: The Kenyan sound artist finds a new mode of listening on his collaboration with Kevin Martin.


KMRU Details New Album, ‘Natur’
It's the Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist's first record for UK label Touch
KMRU has a new album on the way, titled Natur.
Comprised of a single lengthy piece that the Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist composed in 2022, it marks his debut release for the UK label Touch. Since he first made the piece, it has become a staple of his live sets, which he has used to reshape it into the final form that will be released in July. “I became [the piece],” he said in a statement. “I merged with it on a performance level.”
As with past KMRU works, Natur makes use of various environmental recordings. There are also moments of harsh and static noise, as well as drones, captured using electromagnetic microphones.
Natur will follow on from KMRU’s forthcoming collaboration with Kevin Richard Martin, Disconnect, which is due out in June.
Touch will release Natur on July 26, 2024.

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Kevin Richard Martin and KMRU team up for hypnotic new album: Disconnect
Out 14th June via Phantom Limb
Acclaimed heavyweights Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug) and Joseph Kamaru (KMRU) unite
for the upcoming album Disconnect, out 14th June through UK indie label Phantom Limb.
The LP is a powerful study of dread, hope, and profound sonics that marries depth-trawling
dub with Kamaru’s voice, ambient sensibilities, and negative space.

Pre order Vinyl

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