Twin heavyweights Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug) and Joseph Kamaru (KMRU) follow 2024’s acclaimed collaboration album Disconnect with EP of associated works Otherness, a new study of foreboding tension, hope, and profound sonics that marries depth-trawling dub with Kamaru’s voice, ambient sensibilities, and negative space.
"I think Otherness carries the whole weight and the complexities of Disconnect,” writes Joseph Kamaru. “It extends the album into spaces of the unknown while remaining opaque." Envisioned initially as a part of the album sequence, the “Otherness” tracks were approached just as the rest of KMRU and Kevin Martin’s debut collaboration Disconnect. A core track - “Otherness” - exists as a potent and simmering original, moulded with the meticulous and obsessive craft of two masters in complete control of their music; and then it is pulled to pieces, its fibres torn and ripped to form sibling tracks that occupy similar but complementary spaces. The constituent parts remain related, but have mutated and transformed, reconstructed into an entourage of phantasmic mirrors.
Menacing, but not dark. Tense, but not harrowing. Mystic, but not obtuse. Otherness opens with a tectonic plucking, uneasy crackling and hissing in spectral rhythm, and Joseph Kamaru’s entrancing, reverberate voice telling us that black voices / and black bodies / have been silenced. Then Kevin Martin’s legendary dub-deconstruct riddim programming takes on its most minimal form, creeping and stealing through the shadows. Following, “Others” is more rhythmic still. Now a kick drum enters, pushing and pulling negative space into strange and haunting shapes as a staticky pirate station broadcasts a chorus of lost spirits. FInally, “Other” is drumless, but its bilious, regurgitant white noise takes on the same role with queasy and arresting seduction.
Kevin Martin first became aware of Kenyan ambient musician KMRU “watching the short 2020 documentary Under The Bridge,” he tells us. “Which, aside from immediately finding Joseph's approach to sound and music so instantly impressive, I also found his spoken voice possessed a captivating, lilting, tonal quality, with his soft-spoken accent.” Following this, Martin dug into Kamaru’s records, and found not only a kindred spirit in skilful exploration of sonic space, but also a fan of The Bug. So began a mutually respectful relationship, initially held in Instagram DMs and reciprocal admiration for each other’s work and eventually blossoming into an invitation sent by Kevin to Joseph to collaborate on a new album.
