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
REVIEWS
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Kevin Richard Martin (AKA The Bug) and KMRU collaborate on new album, Disconnect
Kevin Richard Martin (AKA The Bug) and KMRU are releasing a collaborative album.Out on June 14th through Phantom Limb,
Disconnect is an exploration of dread, hope and profound sonics. The LP combines dub and ambient with KMRU's vocals, which Martin described as possessing a captivating, lilting, tonal quality."
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The album originated from an exploration of a text I wrote during my sound art studies, delving into the complexities of otherness, said KMRU. The project served as a response to Audre Lorde's idea that differences should be embraced as a dynamic force within humanity, rather than a perceived threat."
Disconnect follows Martin's run of Machine EPs. He'll also play at Berlin venue Gretchen on April 20th. KMRU's last release was September's Dissolution Grip. He has gigs in Bristol, Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow scheduled for next month.
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Minimal Collective
Nurturing sonic worlds: potentials of field recording with KMRU
‘”I think there's always this force exerted from sound that goes beyond what the sound is in itself.’ That same force drives our conversation with KMRU in which we discuss how sound tickles our memories, our idea of home, and our urge to move. The Berlin-based artist contemplates the musical tapestry that ties together our experiences, thoughts, and dreams.”
HEAVY CALMNESS – AN INTERVIEW WITH KMRU
KMRU
Stupor
How does Joseph Kamaru do that? With "Dissolution Grip" the Kenya-born, Berlin-based artist recently released an outstanding ambient album, and the new LP "Stupor" is also convincing. On only three tracks, which all exceed the ten-minute mark, he carefully expands his idea of the genre, how could it be otherwise. KMRU does not need an acoustic sledgehammer to overwhelm. His tracks are constantly, but hardly noticeable, gaining in energy without making senseless noise. The volume that the 18-minute title track reaches after just a third of its playing time has its purpose. Through her and in her, the music unfolds its force, which this time has a more sacred coat of paint than ever.
The foundation of the three pieces is an almost endlessly long drone, on which different elements shoot transversely or submit to the most delicately overmanned river possible. The opener "CPR-12" is reminiscent of works by Eluvium, which contrast sound walls, as large as life itself, with lovely sounds and samples - in this case Christmas-like sound swabs and children's voices. But that's only half the truth: Towards the end, the track changes, and the mood tilts into the morbid, also thanks to the samples that now play on the Hauntology keyboard. On "Even A Tear" the almost familiar lead drone peels from bass white noise. Also here, as always, with a successful outcome.
KMRU US TOUR 2024
ACL 2023 ~ Top Ten Drone
KMRU ~ glim
On glim KMRU deploys austere melody and the richness of texture playing with everything from strings to piano, comfortable with both scraping dissonance, and gentle hum. There’s a lot to feel with on glim as the artist experiments with a wider dynamic range and a more diverse array of sonic textures than on earlier solo albums such as last year’s Epoch. There is delicate beauty here but it is often threatened, whether by timbral effects such as a drone’s warbling or wavering, by piercing volume, or by the multiplication of sonic layering and crushing volume. A sense of place too, a real sense of place, is threatened by technology on this album, its ability to manipulate and fabricate, to overlay and overlap. The limited play with field recording across a quite noisy and sonically dense album might perhaps be interpreted then as an acknowledgment of the perennial threat that someday we ourselves may not be able to locate the natural. (Jennifer Smart)
ACL 2023 ~ The Top 20 Albums of the Year
5) KMRU ~ glim
We’ve been fans of KMRU’s work since before the release of his breakthrough Peel (2020), and have happily watched his reputation grow with each subsequent release. While he has increasingly embraced the synthesizer, field recording remains the core of his practice. Even if Dissolution Grip, released just a few months ago, features no audible field recordings, Kamaru still interpreted the waveforms of selections from his archives as graphic scores for compositions. But glim, released at the beginning of the year, finds the Berlin-based Kenyan artist continuing his delicate fusion of ambient field recordings and meandering synth tones, to great effect. Avoiding the cliches of both practices—no water or bird sounds, no bleeps or bloops—KMRU continues to grow as a composer. Like the album title, all but the final track consists of one word titles, offering a poetic but mostly inscrutable glimpse into the meaning lurking behind the aural scrim. Full of delicate textural manipulation and dynamic arrangements, glim continues to reveal new aspects on each subsequent immersion within its confines. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Finding Resonance: artists Arman Nouri and KMRU on power, sound and practices of listening
Berlin-based musician Joseph Kamaru — a.k.a. KMRU — has been described as an artist who draws from a rich experience of listening, in response to various global and emotional contexts. Arman Nouri — a London-based artist and half of Kin Structures — has been experimenting with programming sound-based events to gather people together, building political and community resonance. Their conversation reflects a rich reflection of and between their respective practices, exploring the potentials of sound in space.
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The Best Albums of 2023: Essential Releases
Nairobi-born, Berlin-based artist Joseph Kamaru (aka KMRU) has an academic approach to sound. This tendency beams especially bright on Dissolution Grip, which is the first release on his new label, OFNOT. The record emerged as a product of his endeavors in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at Universität der Künste. Across three sprawling pieces, KMRU twists the waveforms of field recordings into melodic tones, causing organic textures to feel synthetic and alien. Dissolution Grip contrasts searing dissonance and raw beauty in mesmerizing fashion.
Quietus Albums Of The Year 2023
56. KMRU – Dissolution Grip
The Kenyan artist plays with the very fabric of sound itself on his new record of powerful, sometimes serrated ambient and drone music.
Dissolution Grip Review
“Powerful ambient that creates great things from simple means - arching dynamic changes, long-drawn tones, serious dramaturgy.“ - HHV Mag
Pitchfork DIssolution Grip
The prolific Kenyan-born, Berlin-based electronic musician departs from his typical use of field recordings, but environmental sound still makes its mark on his immersive, long-form explorations.
THE WIRE : 477
ALBUM OF THE DAY
KMRU, “Dissolution Grip”
a record by a musician masterfully bending a myriad of influences to his will.“
LOUD&QUIET
KMRU: Dissolution Grip
(OFNOT)
Dissolution Grip exists outside of time and place, while deep inside them both. As might be expected given his back catalogue, each of the sounds on KMRU’s latest project started as a location-specific field recording, but were ultimately sculpted and retooled in the image of an orchestra, giving up their origins in the pursuit of beauty.
Invité : KMRU
KMRU Launches Label with New Album'Dissolution Grip' LP is scheduled for September 29 release.
We round up 15 announcements from the last few days.
KMRU - Dissolution Grip
Label: OFNOT Release date: September 29th, 2023KMRU announced the first release on his new label, OFNOT, this week, and also revealed a new project on Finnish label Other Power.Stupor
Nairobi-born Berlin-based sound artist Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, shares his new work Stupor on the new Helsinki-based label Other Power. Commissioned by the Helsinki curatorial and commissioning agency PUBLICS, Stupor is comprised of three original long form tracks. The tracks on the album are speculative notes to social architectures and environments the artist has traversed.
Composed by Joseph Kamaru
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwenbung Mastering
Original photos & artwork by Joseph Kamaru
OBI Design (Publics identity presence) by Valerio Di Lucente
Design by Matti Nives
Co-produced by Performa / PUBLICS / Other Power
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Dissolution Grip
“Dissolution Grip' expands at its own pace until it's a dense wall of harmony, powerful but never completely overwhelming. It's music embedded with a rich sense of place that informs us of KMRU's past and present, and signals where his musical philosophy might take us in the future. “
Pre Order Lp
Bandcamp / ANOST
Out on 29th September at OFNOT
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Drawing Water Reissue , W Abul Mogard
Reissue of KMRU's Drawing Water on Vaagner imprint A Sunken Mall - with the original material spanning the first side of the record in remastered from. The original release contained 3 supple works of porous resonance and intimate motion, giving way to a very heartfelt body of work that peers directly into the fabric of the everyday; gestures, movement, conversation, rendered graciously into waveform. For the second half of the record, the label has taped none other than Abul Mogard, who prepared a new piece by reworking various layers from KMRU’s original compositions.
This new 17 minute long piece, tilted 'Drawing Water On Matching Teal Surfaces' is defined by a continuously cascading and deeply resounding solemnness, which, towards the work’s concluding moments, gradually disperses through a subtle downpour of warm pads, delicately rippling through the fabric of the work, before gently dissolving into thin air."
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Slim Filter
KMRU: Lost in Teufelsberg
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TEMPORARY STORED, PRIX ARS HONORARY MENTION 2023
“(…) Temporary Stored is nonetheless not a rehashing of European colonial violence—this piece rather uses sound as a conjuring of specters of oral and cultural histories of Central and Eastern Africa.”
KMRU scores EXTANT
EXTANT, ON WHAT IS HIDDEN BETWEEN THE APPROPRIATE AND THE INAPPROPRIATE
Choreographer and associate artist Jermaine Maurice Spivey on Extant,
Five Rewire alumni featured on compilation release Remotely Together
Podcast 799: KMRU
Pensive, drifting ambient.
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A Closer Listen
Glim Review
glim cassette- Limited Edition
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Artist Tips: KMRU
The secrets behind the ambient sound artist's work.
Pitchfork Glim Review
This digital-exclusive album from the Berlin-based Kenyan artist sounds blank and unrevealing but opens up to reveal a wealth of detail.
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KMRU’s continuing exploration of reflective ambient space and sound remained top notch on 2023’s glim, one of the artist’s most subtly varied releases yet. With mastering provided by fellow traveller Simon Scott, the twelve piece collection showcases KMRU’s approach around shorter pieces for the most part, with many only just breaking the three minute mark if not four. The expected combination of cryptic field recordings and serene drones can be found but so can crackling disruption on “strain” and the calmest sense of melody on the striking “orna.”
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First Floor #162