Kenyan sound artist
Joseph Kamaru
recorded his album
Peel
within 48 hours, shortly after returning home to Nairobi following a trip to Montreal for the Mutek festival, and right before the COVID-19 lockdown.
's six pieces fall into the "haunted loops" school of ambient music, capturing brief snapshots of electro-acoustic sound and setting them spinning with subtle shifts and alterations. Unlike other artists well known for this type of work, such as
William Basinski
and
the Caretaker
,
KMRU
's music doesn't address themes related to memory, aging, or the passage of time. It feels live, breathing, and radiant rather than slowly fading away into the void of history. He embeds natural sounds such as trickling water and distant bird calls deep into his glowing sound-fields, and some pieces seem to rock back and forth like a ship on the high seas. "Klang" is the album's most densely layered track, as well as its stormiest, but all of its tension is washed away with "Insubstantial," which resembles a solo trek through an abandoned fairground. Most breathtaking of all is the stirring 23-minute title track, which expresses a sense of slow-motion impending doom through gradually building loops and textures, yet does so with gentler tones rather than harsh, suffocating ones. ~ Paul Simpson