Disconnect it opens like a slowly forming pit in your stomach. A bleak, windswept expanse emerges from the silence, and distant booms echo on the horizon. The first sign of life is not reassuring at all: a chorus of groans and exhalations, the universal sound of despair. “Differences” and the follow-up “Arkives” never really build momentum, only piling on more shades of gray as they sprawl into double-digit runtimes. These two pieces make up half of Disconnect alone, and Kevin Richard Martin and KMRU spend the rest of the album stripping them down and peeling back the layers in classic dub fashion—until they resemble errant puffs of smoke escaping a Rhythm & Sound track.
Anyone familiar with the two artists' work shouldn't be surprised by how bleak their first collaboration sounds. Martin is best known for the soulful dubstep he makes as Bug, but he's recorded much of his best work over the past decade in a more ambient setting, including his solo album. Sirens and the big one Concrete Desert with drone legends Earth. KMRU, born Joseph Kamaru, exploded in the 2020s Peel on the late Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego label, and has since amassed an eclectic if generally monochromatic catalog. These are musicians who thrive in stormy, revelatory sound worlds. Disconnect is a natural extension of both their repertoires.
What a surprise Disconnect is the inclusion of Kamaru's vocals. The spoken word excerpts expand on a theme he previously explored on his 2022 album Temporarily Saved: the theft of African artefacts from Western museums and archives. “African traditions are passed down through apprenticeship and other oral traditions,” the Kenyan-born artist explains in “Arkives,” in contrast to the Western emphasis on written documents that are considered “ontologically specific.” In both albums, Kamaru argues that keeping African objects in Western museums distorts their meaning and purpose, as many of these objects are “more than just objects” in their own cultures.
Martin first discovered Camaro through a documentary and was drawn to his musical sensibilities as well as the quality of his voice. On the four versions of “Differences” and “Arkives” that make up the second half of the album, Martin shreds Kamaru's voice into tiny pieces, emphasizing the “ark” part of the “archives”: It's a fitting choice for a record that it is like the first rains of a cataclysmic flood. At first, it may escape the attention of a casual listener that these are six variations on two songs, not because the versions are radically different from each other, but because the sound palette is so consistent and so restrained that everything eventually blurs into an amorphous miasma.
What's strange is that Kamaru's vocals on “Arkives” are smeared in loudspeaker filters and delay effects that occasionally make them hard to understand. This initially seems like an odd decision for an album that consciously tries to make a point about colonial violence, but presenting DisconnectHis two key pieces as mutable materials rather than treatises written in stone, the two artists honor the fragility of tradition through the very medium they work with. Dub treats songs as living, breathing, changing entities. Disconnect he gets his message through Kamaru's words and through the music itself, whose darkness feels less oppressive thanks to the creators talking about life.
