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LP
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HJR 090LP
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Scintillating, alchemical kosmische; visionary, deep, and luminous; and beautifully sleeved, with gold foiling and silver ink. Works In Metal fans out a set of acid treatments and finely sharpened blades -- cutting, shaping, suspending form. Sounds are melted down and forged as if liquid metal. The works are paired. "Arc's Blue Flame" previews the smoking volatility at the album's core. Echoes and resonance soften the dissonant, bright textures; all overlaid with Fofana's signature, percussive kick drums. "Welding" drills into the discordant thrills and spills of metamorphosis. Sparks fly and the bittersweet arc of change unfolds. Lamin Fofana discreetly folds in text, poetry, and field recordings, spooring their decomposition and recomposition with a prismatic point of view. The coupling "Obscure Light (Decomposition)" and "Obscure Light (Recomposition)" marks something new in his music. The pulse is brightly honed, cascading beyond the dancefloor, exultingly eluding musical genre. Works in Metal is perhaps Fofana's most narrative album. At its heart is the killer, extended "Lure of the Fragment/So Another Sound Suggests Itself." Melodies circle in call-and-response patterns, balancing proximity and distance, signaling the inward gravity required to work with metal. A nested story-line, with birds flying in; an album within an album. Dredging up memories and associations, Fofana filters in selections from his sound-archives. Layered with synths, field recordings become instruments in their own right. The last three minutes proffer precious clarity -- a memory, in miniature, flashed onto molten metal. In 1943 Suzanne Césaire declared that "our surrealism will then supply them the leaven from their very depths. It will be time finally to transcend the sordid contemporary antinomies: Whites-Blacks, Europeans-Africans, civilized-savage: the powerful magic of the mahoulis will be recovered, drawn from the very wellsprings of life. Colonial idiocies will be purified by the welding arc's blue flame. The mettle of our metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unique communions -- all will be recovered." Works in Metal is a tribute to her prophecy; its enactment, sculpted in sound.
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12"
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HJP 098EP
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Epic, grooving, dazzlingly creative, perfectly attuned blends of complex mbalax drumming, field recordings, thumping kick-drum, and cosmic, bubbling, jamming synths and electronics. The opening is suitably liminal, haunted by a diachronic sense of times past, present, and to come: ancestral ghosts, scratched playback, scraps of old recordings, voices strangulated or just out of range; puttering drums; futuristic, kosmische keys. Part II picks up the pace; III gives the drummers some, and heightens the atmosphere of enchantment. Jon Hassell's Fourth World music courses through a kind of Dream Theory In Dakar. "Toco SOS," the second side, is a thumping, throbbing, mesmeric future-classic. Expert hand percussion, call-and-response singing, bin-trembling foot-drum, spaceways keys. Sleekly funky as prime Popol Vuh. Both sides range expansively by way of Berlin, where Lamin resided for a few years. Half an hour of stunning music; in a beautiful sleeve, with mirror lettering, and an intricate spot-gloss rendition of salt crystals, laid over a photograph of the salt mines at Lac Rose, outside Dakar.
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LP
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H 034LP
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Lamin Fofana is an electronic producer and artist. His instrumental electronic music contrasts the reality of our world with what's beyond and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation, and belonging. He is from Sierra Leone, lived in Guinea, United States, and currently located in Berlin. "Fofana, who was born and raised in Sierra Leone and Guinea, runs the Sci-Fi & Fantasy label -- home to, among other things, Lotic's first releases. His own work is part of a dialogue between techno, as it's broadly understood, and more abstracted forms. With the Another World EP, he attempts to link techno back to the real world, to bridge aesthetics with socio-economics, with ocean currents, with stale bread and dirty water. It's right there in the subtitle of the third track: '(Realist Mix)'." --Pitchfork "Fofana paired techno beats and nebulous pads to create instrumentals that seek to contrast the reality of our world with what's beyond." --The Fader
Lamin Fofana on Brancusi Sculpting Beyonce: "In the face of devastating violence, how are you responding? I think deeply about the moment we're in and am searching for a response that's not blatant or overt, but more-so inviting the listener to contemplate their own mindset. The music here is an expression, my response to surviving these traumatic, unpredictable times. Most of the new sounds came out of the experience of living in Berlin and traveling around Europe. 'Brâncuși sculpting Beyoncé in gold lamé' is a line from Mike Ladd's song 'Blonde Negress' from the album Negrophilia (2005). The album was inspired by Petrine Archer-Straw's book of the same name (with the subtitle 'Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s'). The book explores the Paris art world's embrace of black American and African culture -- and its co-option of black art and culture, which played heavily into Art Deco, Cubism, jazz, etc. I read the book some years back, but I love how Mike Ladd warps it, drawing a long line between Beyonce and Brancusi, whose 'Sleeping Muse' was inspired by African masks."
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