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LP
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OP 080LP
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Okokon returns to Other People with his sophomore album, Offering, delving deeper into the lush and cinematic soundscapes he first explored on his debut album, Turkson Side. While primarily working in visual arts, Africanus Okokon, who records under his surname, bridges his artistic practices in Offering, using his masterful collage techniques to create his most personal work yet. Defying easy categorization, the album melds influences from dream pop, avant-garde folk, psychedelia, trip hop, and dub, with traces of field recordings seamlessly blended throughout to form a cohesive whole. Offering sees Okokon confronting and negotiating a sudden and unexplained death that occurred in his childhood and the complex emotions left in its aftermath, acting as his main inspiration when making the album. This ambiguity is something that permeates throughout, with Okokon wanting to explore the ambivalence and sometimes uneasiness of contradicting emotions appearing simultaneously, alluded to in the album title. This is also reflected in how the album tracks each inhabit different narrators with varying perspectives on the same events. The result being a hauntingly beautiful album, with recurring themes of death, growth, sacrifice and spirituality ever present. Featuring Okwui Okpokwasili.
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LP
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OP 029LP
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180-gram vinyl. Just waking up and everything sounding slower. Holes in the wall. The unknown in the familiar. The shock of the new. Just-turned rubble. Thick clouds of recall. Muted highlife, de-centered hip-hop, and disparate conversation. Heavy, sinking jazz and dissected infomercials. Too much chewing gum? Not quite anything, or half of something. Reminds me of. Smells like...? Turkson Side is Africanus Okokon's first album. It is almost entirely sample-based, made largely within a simple, custom-made playback software with each track recorded in one take with very little editing. "Wrake" is the only exception, a recording of him playing an Ethiopian krar inside his house. Africanus is no stranger to Other People. Primarily a visual artist with background in video, animation, and collage, he's designed most of Other People's site graphics and a number of release covers. In part, this album as Okokon is a translation of a developed aesthetic to an unfamiliar medium. Like his collage and animation work, it's rough-hewn yet deliberate, consciously inclusive of digital processing and sampling of artifacts for their unique texture and visceral affect. Throw the means aside, though, and what you've got is an evocative collection of craggy, trance-inducing concrète-poetry that acts equally well as soundscapes for late night or early morning. "Asphalt" starts things, a near-15-minute "multimovement" piece that moves through zones of blasted commercial intro FX, alien telecast highlife, gibberish spoken word, and xylophonic skeleton dance marching music, lingering at every interstice. Shorter, more singular pieces follow, each swathing and detailing a particular rhythmic structure with choice loops -- the detritus of film soundtracks, warped conversation, gainpumped jazz-shuffles, and old, mystic drum tapes that glitch and squeeze through the software's un-sanded synapses. Higher volumes are recommended to bring out the record's finer imperfections.
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